Index # TBD
Distribution Requirement: A5, B
Time: Wednesday - 12:10 p.m.
Location: MU 207
Dark Times
This class considers modern theory, poetry, and drama broadly engaged in “dark times,” a name Hannah Arendt gives to periods marked by a loss of relation, from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 poem “To those born later.” We will begin with questions posed by Arendt and Brecht about isolation, fear, and changing notions of ethical obligation, and then move to other works that deal with new formations of public life in the 20th century and the 21st-century subject without rights. What, in dark times, is the purpose of criticism?
We will read between theoretical and literary texts in order to take up the significant cultural and political problems that recur across periods of dark times. Questions about critical distance, action, tragedy, spectatorship, propaganda, terror, affect, and individuality will guide our discussions. With particular attention to Brecht’s theatrical alienation and Arendt’s account of social atomization, we will explore how theater and literature have represented, and have attempted to intervene in, the loss of strong social ties.
The seminar will develop a shared language for the politics of critical theory, but we won’t be undertaking a particular archive of Western media or political philosophy. Instead, the course will focus on methods of dialectical reading that allow us to bring out the theoretical proposals of many kinds of texts—and to understand theory as a practice that can be playful and experimental, even when addressing the darkest of times (which, ultimately, is what many of these twentieth-century critics were trying to do: to show the familiar world, and its familiar horrors, in strange new ways through attention to the material they encountered, from trash on the street to newspaper horoscopes to Goethe).
Other than Brecht and Arendt, writers studied may include Theodor Adorno, Will Arbery, Walter Benjamin, Edward Bond, Judith Butler, Caryl Churchill, John Guare, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Maria Irene Fornes, Rajiv Joseph, Franz Kafka, Achille Mbembe, Martin McDonagh, and Gayatri Spivak.
Writing will include a conference-length essay (no more than 10 pages) and a short respondent statement; students will also compose and share informal responses (some written, some in other forms) to prompts throughout the semester.