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Studies in Literature and the Arts (487-0-1)

Topic

The Right To Look

Instructors

Maria Alejandra Uslenghi
847/467-1713
3-113 Crowe

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 215: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course provides an introduction to foundational texts in the history of modern western (primarily German) theoretical aesthetics. Starting from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's emphatic appropriation the term "aesthetics" to designate the study of beauty and good taste, the course will move chronologically through major texts of aes-thetic theory from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The course will both examine the specific problems and questions raised by the various texts and consider the texts as history, looking at the ways in which these works both respond to one another and to the political and cultural tensions of their respective eras. We will also consider the ways in which these texts cross disciplinary boundaries or indeed are always already transdisciplinary, constantly moving from the comparatively narrow fields of artistic and literary criticism to fundamental issues of ethics, epistemology, politics, and psychology, and back and forth all over again, always asking ourselves the questions: What are the historical conditions of the ways in which we make and/or think about works of art, broadly conceived, and how does this, in turn, shape the world that art is said to reflect?