Art Theory in the Pre-Modern World

 

Week 1, Sept. 9 – Introduction and Overview

Reading:

• H. Gene Blocker, “Non-Western Aesthetics as a Colonial Invention” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35.4 (2001).

 

Week 2, Sept. 16 – Ancient Greece and the Philosophy of Art

Readings:

• Plato, “Book X,” Republic, starts on p. 1199.

• Aristotle, Poetics, 1-31

 

Optional:

• Sappho, “Ode to Aphrodite”.

 

Week 3, Sept 23 – Art Theory in Ancient China

Reading:

• Tu Wei-Ming (Dù Wéimíng), “The Idea of the Human in Mencian Thought: An Approach to Chinese Aesthetics” in Theories of the Arts in China, 57-73.

 

Recommended:

• Xun Kuang (Xunzi), “Books 19 and 20” Xunzi: The Complete Text. Eric Hutton, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014

 

Week 4, Sept 30 – NO CLASSES

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Week 5, Oct. 7 – Islamic Aesthetics

Reading:

• Jale Nejdet Erzen, “Islamic Aesthetics: An Alternative Way to Knowledge” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65.1 (2007).

 

Optional:

• Rumi, Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi

• Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát

 

 

Modern European Aesthetics in the German Tradition

 

Week 6, Oct. 14 – Transcendental Subjectivity and Aesthetic Experience

Reading:

• Immanuel Kant, “The Analytic of the Beautiful” and “Analytic of the Sublime” (selections) in The Critique of the Power of Judgment, 87-124, 128-147

 

Recommended:​

• Gilles Deleuze, “The Relationship of the Faculties in the Critique of Judgment” Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963)

• Meg Armstrong, “'The Effects of Blackness': Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996), 213-236

 

 

Week 7, Oct. 21 – Marxist Aesthetics in the Frankfurt School

Reading:

• Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (second version)

 

Recommended:

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment

• Theodor Adorno,  "Semblance and Expression" in Aesthetic Theory, 100-118

 

 

N. American Theories of Art in the 20th and 21st Centuries

 

Week 8, Oct. 28 – Art and Signs in Anglo-American Aesthetics

Reading:

• Nelson Goodman, “Reality Remade” in Languages of Art

 

Recommended:

• C. S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce.

• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 65-78

• John Dewey, Art as Experience. 27-34

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Week 9, Nov. 4 – Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Art Thinking

NO VIDEO LECTURE

Reading:

• Richard William Hill, “Is There an Indigenous Way to Write about Indigenous Art?” Canadian Art (2016) https://canadianart.ca/essays/indigenous-way-write-indigenous-art/

 

Recommended:

• David Garneau, “Indigenous Art: From Appreciation to Art Criticism” https://cdn.ymaws.com/aesthetics-online.org/resource/resmgr/articles/DavidGarneau.pdf

• ____________, “Writing About Indigenous Art with Critical Care” https://momus.ca/writing-about-indigenous-art-with-critical-care/

• Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” Decolonization:    Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012).

• Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (selections) (2014).

 

Week 10, Nov. 11 – NO CLASSES (Remembrance Day, Fall Break)

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Week 11, Nov. 18 – Blackness and Art

Reading:

• Huey Copeland, “The Blackness of Things” in Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (2014), pp. 1-22.

 

Recommended:

• Christina Sharpe, “The Wake” in The Wake: On Blackness and Being. (2016)

• Frank B. Wilderson III, “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” in Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010)

• Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream” in The Break: On the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. (2003)

• Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Diacritics 17.2 (1987).

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1945)

• Zora Neal Hurston, Mules and Men

 

Week 12, Nov. 25 - Feminism/Queer Theory

Reading:

• Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures (1975), 14-26

  Jack (Judith) Halberstam, "Cutting" in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), 135-144

 

Recommended:

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (selections) (1949)

• Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)

• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) (selections)

• bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators" (1994) in Feminism and Visual Culture Reader

 

 

Modes of Art/Figures of the Artist in Neo-Liberal Times

 

Week 13, Dec. 2 -  Artistic Authority and Authorship

Readings:

• Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967) in Image-Music-Text, 142-148

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Optional:

• Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act.” (1957).

• VIDEO: Gilles Deleuze, “What Is the Creative Act?” (1987)

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Recommended:

• T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919)

• W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946).

• Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969) in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 113-139.

 

Week 14, Dec. 9  – Subjectivity, Originality, Economy

Readings:

• Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” e-flux journal # 10, 2009.

• _________, “If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms” e-flux journal # 76, 2016.

 

Optional:

• Robin Mackay, "Hyperplastic-Supernormal" (2017)

 

Recommended:

• Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1966) in Against Interpretation, 191-202.

• Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” October 8 (1979).

• Thierry de Duve, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Bueys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (selections) (2012).

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Week 15, Dec. 16 – Course Conclusion/Final Presentation Workshop

NO READINGS

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