ARTH 561
Writing About Bodies Fall 2013
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The goal of this course is to think about describing bodies from a variety of disciplinary approaches and genres of writing. It expands the art historical focus on represented bodies to include the experience of real bodies in time and space, including performing bodies, such as actors, dancers, and singers, and what makes them unique. It also considers objects associated with bodies, and the ways they are animated, including how they are animated when the person who had them dies. The course invites students who wish to analyze bodies from different disciplinary formations–art, theatre, literature, anthropology, philosophy–and who have a particular interest in the experiential dimensions of writing. We will read scholarly writing, fiction, New Yorker profiles, as well as memoir/autobiography, and use them as models for writing about a person or an object redolent of a person. In the process, we will explore historiographies of the body starting in the 1970s. Possible readings: Roland Barthes on cultural theory and representation; Zine Magubane and Zadie Smith on “other people”; Tamar Garb on portraiture; Elaine Scarry on the body in pain; Joan Acocella, Hilton Als, Judith Thurman and other writers on the arts; Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan on the performative body; Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, and Michael Taussig on the body, memory, and ritual; Marvin Carlson and Terry Castle on haunting; and Arjun Appadurai and Bill Brown on things. These will be supplemented by live performances at The `62 Center for Theater and Dance and MASS MoCA as well as films. Tutorial transposed to the seminar. In the English tutorial, students are paired and alternate writing a 4-5-page essay based on the assignment and a 2 page response that they read aloud to the other and the professor as a prelude to discussion. In our seminar the entire class does the same readings. Three pairs per week prepare essays and responses and read them aloud, followed by questions, comments, and expanded discussion from the class as a whole.
The Class: Format: tutorial transposed to the seminar;in the English tutorial, students are paired and alternate writing a 4-5 page essay based on the assignment and a 2 page response which they read aloud to the other and the professor as a prelude to discussion
Limit: 12
Expected: 12
Class#: 1510
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: alternating weekly essays (4-5 pages) based on the assignment, and responses (2-4 pages) as well as discussion; a 15-page final paper that distills the writer's own project from these cumulative exercises
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the Gaudino option
Extra Info 2: in our seminar the entire class does the same readings, three pairs per week prepare essays and responses and read them aloud, followed by questions, comments, and expanded discussion from the class as a whole
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: graduate program students and then to senior Art History majors
Distributions: Division I

Class Grid

Course Catalog Archive Search

TERM/YEAR
TEACHING MODE
SUBJECT
DIVISION



DISTRIBUTION



ENROLLMENT LIMIT
COURSE TYPE
Start Time
End Time
Day(s)