Course Description
To what degree is aesthetic experience--the experience of art or beauty--a political experience? This course addresses that question in two ways: first, by studying aesthetic theory from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first; and second, by examining particular case studies, which will vary by semester.
Athena Title
Aesthetics and Politics
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
By the end of the course, students will have a deeper knowledge of aesthetic philosophy and its various applications. 1. Having read a substantial body of theory and literature, students will be able to discuss and write about the relation between art and politics with a considerable degree of critical sophistication. 2. Students will enhance their critical thinking skills by considering the literary, philosophical, and political texts raised by juxtaposing texts from a multitude of genres, periods, and perspectives. 3. As they navigate dense theoretical writing, students will gain advanced training in humanities-based research skills.
Topical Outline
The topics considered will vary from semester to semester and instructor to instructor. This sample topical outline is for a version of the course focused on aesthetics, politics, identity, and citizenship. I. Aesthetic Theory, Classical and Romantic * Plato, from The Republic; David Graeber, “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” * Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment * Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful * Friedrich Schiller, from On the Aesthetic Education of Man; Arthur Schopenhauer, from The World as Will and Representation * Walt Whitman, 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass II. Modern Iterations * Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Wrong” * Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Fair” * Jacques Rancière, “Part One: The Distribution of the Sensible” * Pierre Bourdieu, from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste * Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, chapters 1 through 4 * Society of the Spectacle, chapters 5 through 9 III. Case Studies * Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra” and “America” * Isaak Brodsky and Diego Rivera, selected paintings; Susan Buck-Morss, “Revolutionary Time” * Beyonce, “Lemonade” * Rita Felski, “Why Feminism Doesn’t Need an Aesthetic”; bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody * Pablo Picasso, Guernica; Wilfred Owen, Poems * Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters” * Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads and “This Land is Your Land”; Bob Dylan, The Times They are a-Changin’; Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A. * Walt Whitman, “Song of the Answerer,” “I Hear America Singing,” “Still Though the One I Sing,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “For You O Democracy,” “I Dreamed in a Dream,” “Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States,” “Proud Music of the Storm” * Ralph Waldo Emerson, selected writings * Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps * Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism; selected paintings by Umberto Boccionni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini * Ezra Pound, Canto LXIV and Jefferson and/or Mussolini; Wai Chee Dimock, “Aesthetics and Treason: Kant and Pound” * Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style * Claudia Rankine, Citizen * Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard * Juliana Spahr, “Well Then There Now”