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The aim of this module is to allow students to study a distinctive aspect of modern French politics. France has a history of violence in revolution, counter-revolution, coup d'etat, foreign occupation and protracted colonial wars, not to mention lower-level violence on the streets and in factories. We will look at some influential and important theories of political violence, including those of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We will also examine actual moments of particularly intense violence -- including Occupation and Resistance, 1940-1944; the Algerian struggle for independence, 1954-1962; and May 1968 -- and ask whether the contemporary French political scene is much less prone to violence than in the past. At the centre of discussion will be important contemporary questions such as: 'Is political violence always wrong?' and 'does liberal democracy represent an advance over other, more explicitly violent forms of political arrangements?'
Why and how are areas divided into different disciplines?
How does this help/ hinder us when considering the Sustainable Development Goals?
Ahead of the seminar, please complete the following two tasks:
-Read Chapter 2, 'The Rise of the Modern Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity', from Introduction to interdisciplinary studies by Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michele Phillips Buchberger.
The uncompromising modernity of Kafka’s writing has fascinated generations of readers across the world. His fiction has added the word Kafkaesque to the English dictionary for the experience of an obscure and dislocating modernity. A vast body of criticism concerns the question of how to read a body of writing that upsets many of the reader’s conventional expectations about meaning-making. In this module we will analyse how Kafka employs realist, symbolist and allegorical frames of reference in order to challenge the very notion of stable meaning. You will study a selection of Kafka’s short stories with reference to the following themes: narrative perspective; authority, law and justice; gender roles; performance art and Kafka’s animals. The module is optional for students on all degrees and runs over one term.
Course Outline and Weekly Schedule
Week 1: Introduction: Auf der Galerie
Week 2: NO CLASS! Preparation for: Patriarchal Power and the Power of the Unconscious in Das Urteil [See 'Student Preparation']
Week 3: Patriarchal Power and the Power of the Unconscious in Das Urteil (continued)
Week 4: NO CLASS! Social Power and Collective Memory in Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer and “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft”
Week 5 a): Performance Art or Art as Sham? Ein Hungerkünstler
Week 5 b): Lecture, Wednesday 31 October, 2018, 5-7pm: When Anti-World Literature Turns into World Literature: Kafka’s Archives of Resistance
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Kafka's Animals: Kafka‘s Kleine Fabel in Comparison with Aesop’s Der Löwe und die Maus
Week 8: Kafka's Animals: The Ape and his Audience in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie
Week 9: Kafka's Animals: Narrative Perspective and Gender in Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse
Week 10 a): Make-up lesson for week 4, Monday 3rd December [room: TBA]: Social Power and Collective Memory in Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer and “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft”
Week 10 b) Course Summary: “Vor dem Gesetz” and Franz Kafka's Engagement with Modernity
You will examine the way in which the modern notions of identity we have today, be they gendered or ethnic identities, were forged in the past by intellectual, social, scientific and aesthetic processes and movements ranging from the Enlightenment, through Romanticism and beyond. Moved by the concept of reason, the Enlightenment envisioned ongoing social and cultural progress for all of humanity. Yet feminist, postcolonial and orientalist theories of culture have shown how the criteria for progress were often geared against so-called ‘others’ of reason, which ultimately meant the exclusion of women, non-whites, non-Christians and non-Europeans from that ideal future.
In this module you will examine a range of German-language texts written by men and women. We will treat themes such as Jewish identity, Islam, race and skin colour, slavery, gender and sexuality against the backdrop of a critical study of 'power' and 'hierarchy', Empire and colonialism. We will refer to key texts by writers such as Ute Frevert, Sigrid Weigel, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon.
The culture of the period can be used to illustrate ways in which the gendered and ethnic aspects of human identity were given at times progressive, at times limiting, conservative and even oppressive treatments throughout the period from 1750 to 1830. The more restrictive models of subjectivity, sexuality, gender and ‘race’ we will find in this historical material, as well as the creative challenges put to them by writers of this period, all remain relevant: studying these texts and these ideas deepens our understanding of the historical processes that led to how we understand ourselves and our others today.
Module Outline
This module has been designed to introduce students to the critical evaluation of visual and documentary evidence through a discussion of works of art that have been revealed or are polemically considered to be fakes. Taking a thematic approach, the module will consider cases from the medieval to the contemporary across different media. The following questions will be addressed: What is authenticity? When did the notion of forgery emerge? What is the difference between copy, replica, and forgery? Is restoration a sort of forgery? Is there a science to reveal forgeries? What is the relationship between fake and mass culture? Two important 20th-century films will provide further points for study. The module will be team-taught and will also introduce students to the range and presentation methods of the members of the department.
Syllabus
Introduction: Restoration or Replication?
Reproduction, Revival, Forgery
Technical Analysis: An Anti-Forgery?
Archives of Forgeries
The Forger as Artist?
The Architectural Simulacrum
Appropriation, Authorship, Copyright
The Real/Fake Debate
Forgery and Connoisseurship
Assessment:
Essay (1500 words; 100%; to be submitted by the end of the term)
Bibliography
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin, 2008).
Lynn Catterson, Finding, Fixing, Faking, Making: Supplying Sculpture in ‘400 Florence (Todi: Ediart, 2014).
Leah R. Clark, “Transient Possessions: Circulation, Replication, and Transmission of Gems and Jewels in Quattrocento Italy,” in Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011):185–221.
Bruce Cole and Ulrich Middledorf: “Masaccio, Lippi, or Hugford?,” in Burlington Magazine 113 (1971):500–507.
Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, “Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001):523–41.
Jonathon Keats, Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Joris Kila and Marc Balcells, eds., Cultural Property Crime (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014).
Thierry Lenain, Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
Tomas Loch, “The Changing Meaning of Copies: Citations and Use of Plaster Casts in Art from the Renaissance to the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in Copia e invención (Valladolid: Museo Nacional de Escultura, 2013):107–39.
Ken Perenyi, Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger (New York: Pegasus, 2012).
David A. Scott, Art: Authenticity, Restoration, Forgery (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archeology Press, 2016).
Walter Stephens, “When Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his Forged Antiquities,” in MLN 119 (2004):201–23.
This module intends to provide students with a basic knowledge of the ways in which architecture (as design, planning, and ideology) became one of the delegated fields in which a social, political, or cultural idea of the future could be articulated and implemented from the age of Industrial Revolution to the present day. The module will show how the ideas of theorists and visionaries ended up influencing the form of the everyday built environment around the world. The course will start by exploring the way that rapid urbanisation and industrialisation led many to seek alternative ways of living, whether by looking towards an idealised often-rural past. The module will cover many of the most influential and radical urban theorists of the last 200 years, and will show how their ideas informed the creation of new communities around the globe. It will end by asking how useful Utopian ideas are for solving the many challenges that face urban populations today.