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COLT 103 - Intro to Comparative Literature III: Visual Culture

Instructor: Dawn Marlan

Term: Spring 2017

From “The Optical Unconscious” to “The Edge of Sight”

Fascinated by photography’s ability to make visible the things that evade perception, Walter Benjamin coined the term “the optical unconscious,” suggesting that we live in a world only partially perceived.  In this course we examine various ways of understanding how invisible or unconscious objects, desires, anxieties, and ideologies are manifested in the visual realm.  Whether we locate such unconscious material, after Benjamin, in technology itself, or following Rosalind Kraus, in the artists who externalize such material in visual forms, we will be interested in exploring the elusiveness of images.  This course will have two goals: to familiarize students with the methods and concepts for analyzing images; and to interpret images that appear to resist meaning by actively attempting to distort, mislead, confuse, provoke, disturb, or disorient the viewer.  Primarily taking still and moving pictures as our objects (photography and film), we will examine material that challenges photography’s early promise to put a mirror to the world by seeking to shape or construct reality rather than merely represent it. We will be looking instead for the things that fail to register, for absence as much as presence, and for what remains beyond the frame in what Shawn Michelle Smith calls “the edge of sight.”

Readings may include theoretical pieces by Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Kraus, Shawn Michelle Smith, Roland Barthes, Peter de Bolla, Susan Sontag, Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, David Bordwell, Laura Muvey, Slavok Zizek; photography by Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Edward Burtynsky, Florence Henri, Holland Day, Joel Peter Witkin, The Starn Brothers, Laura Letinksy, Zoe Zimmerman, Fabrice Monteiro; and films by F.W. Mourn, Fritz Lang, Alain Resnais, Luis Benuel, Christopher Nolan, David Lynch, and Sophia Coppola.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

  • Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
  • Multicultural Courses: International Cultures (IC)