INTS 17.08 The Humanities and Human Rights: Thoughts on Community
This course will focus on the deep connections between democracy and the role of the arts in the public sphere. Never has the public sphere been so challenged, so weakened, so undermined by the logic of an all-encompassing economic rationale that has evolved from the abstraction of economic theory and its vision of unimaginable profits to the reality of dilapidated world economies and bankrupt social welfare systems. Given this blindness, it comes as no surprise that we would be living in times that do not pay enough attention to the humanities or to the aesthetic realm for they seem too "removed" from the day to day facts of "reality." But let's think again. Who bears witness to the suffering and inequalities around us, to the walls that have been relentlessly erected to keep us all in place? Writers, filmmakers, documentarians, photographers, poets, individuals, who make "energy" (intellectual energy) usable in different places and contexts (Hutcheon). This course will cross disciplinary boundaries and follow the "comparative method" scrupulously. We will be reading literature with care and learning how to read literarily—with intensive textual scrutiny, defiance, and metatheoretical awareness (Saussy)—a wide array of theoretical and filmic texts. Our goal will be to travel from the theoretical to the particular and vice-versa, from the literary and filmic stories to the suprapersonal, to the wider polity and back to the personal, for these texts share a passion for change through recognizing our shared vulnerability and humanity. With varying degrees of insight, these texts bear witness to how the experience of crisis and regeneration is also a gendered one.
Instructor
A. Martin
Cross Listed Courses
WGSS 67.04; COLT 57.08