[C7G] Education Part 2 of 6: The Critical Theory Seminar

Posted on January 9, 2014

Description:

(CTCR501) Upper-division seminar that situates the relations between words, images, and objects within social and historical fields and elaborates a theory of aesthetic representation in relation to social and political change. In the Critical Theory Seminar, students analyze notions of critique in the work and life of major thinkers, paying particular attention to their understanding of theory and practice, thought and action, invention and intervention, form and feeling, medium and message, matter and memory, time and experience, intelligence and the senses, aesthetics and representation in relation to technological procedures, sociological categorization, political phenomena, and the capture and creation of lived realities. We begin by expanding the meaning of contemporaneity and go on to examine how meaning, individual and collective, is made or, conversely, unmade under various conditions. Students can expect to read Agamben, Arendt, Bachelard, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bergson, Flusser, Foucault, Levinas, McLuhan, Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Simmel.