 |
|
Year One |
|
for dates, locations, and credit hours. |
|
|
|
~~~~~~~ |
|
|
|
|
~~~~~~~ |
|
Year Two |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Year Three |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dissertation |
|
|
|
To receive the PhD degree, in addition to completing the three-year, 60 credit Course of Study, candidates are required to pass the oral and written qualifying exams at the end of the third year and successfully complete and defend the dissertation. The dissertation is submitted within two years following completion of the Course of Study. Extensions may be granted upon application to the Dissertation Committee. s |
Course Descriptions
Year One
The purpose of this course in critical theory and cultural studies is to (re)introduce the student to the major conceptual and practical issues that confronted artists, theorists, critics, philosophers, and aestheticians in the twentieth century. Through the readings, seminar discussions, presentations, and debates, as well as written assignments, the student is also expected to familiarize herself/himself with the language of theory, aesthetics, and philosophy as it developed over the course of the century. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the intention of the course is to give the student a “feel” for art as a dynamic, ever-changing mode of cultural and historical discourse. To that end, a lecture series on the ideology of aesthetics in Manet and Degas will situate twentieth-century
aesthetic theory in relation to nineteenth-century psychoanalytic styles of representation. Study in Siena, Florence, and at the Venice Biennale will further our twentieth-century contextual horizons to include the theoretical concerns of feudal, Renaissance, baroque, neoclassical, and contemporary aesthetics. The contemporary context will look back at the twentieth-century from the standpoint of new media, especially sonic art.
Kant’s Third Critique (The Critique of Judgement) is arguably the first treatise on aesthetics to systematically theorize the relation between the subject/viewer and the art object---a relation that Kant analyzes largely on the basis of his famously Copernican theory of subjectivity. Contrary to Kant, Hegel sees the relation between the viewer and the art object as a spiritual one resulting from the dialectical history of ideas. Marx & Engels turn the Hegelian dialectic on its head, arguing that history is a dialectical struggle between classes for control of the material world, leaving art to the ideological vicissitudes of revolution---at least according to Lenin. With his invention of a new science, Freud moves away from philosophical and historical concepts of subject/object
relations and opens up yet another field of aesthetic inquiry and debate---psychoanalytic theory. As we shall see, all of these critical approaches to art come down to the question of freedom. More specifically, we might say that our project is to understand how Kant lays the groundwork for the critique of art as form, while Hegel lays the groundwork for the critique of art as history; and how Marx and Engels extend the Hegelian project to the possibility of a social criticism of art as ideological discourse, while Freud presents the possibility of a psychoanalytic critique of art as an aesthetic representation of individual subjectivity. Our project in the fall (Seminar II, Part 2) will be to trace these nineteenth-century ideas and issues as they bump up against each other and maneuver for cultural ascendancy in the twentieth century.
Seminar II, Part 1 prepared the groundwork for Art in Theory Revisited. In Kant we saw the critique of art as form, in Hegel, the critique of art as history; and while Marx extended the Hegelian project to the possibility of a social criticism of art as ideological discourse, Freud presented the possibility critiquing art as the aesthetic representation of individual human subjectivity. The purpose of Seminar II, Part 2 is to re-read Art in Theory 1900-2000 in order to more fully grasp the ways in which Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud inform twentieth-century ideas and debates about the historical status and function of art.
Seminar III begins with a six-day January intensive residency in New York City. Each morning visiting lecturers will deliver presentations concerning ethics within the context of a symposium on “Art, Ethnicity, and Globalization.”
Afternoons will be devoted to museum work (The Harlem Studio Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, The Guggenheim Museum, etc.). Evenings will be given over to student seminar presentations on fall Independent Studies, with a view toward linking those studies to questions raised in the Symposium Lectures.
In the online section of the course, The Subject and Object of Art will loop back to Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud. In tracing the relation between the subject and the object as it develops over the course of the last two centuries, we start with Karl Jasper’s reading of Kant and then move to Alexandre Kojève’s introduction to Hegel. (This seminar, which Kojève gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939, tremendously affected French intellectual thought. Participants included Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Breton, Lacan, and Sartre; and Foucault and Derrida figure prominently among others who acknowledge a sizable debt to Kojève.) We then venture into subject formation as a question of language and ethics, with Bakhtin’s
theory of dialogical consciousness. While here in particular Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov provides a point of focus, the intent is to think through theories of language toward a philosophy of visual art. To that end Levinas’s ethics of the face of the other and Lacan’s theory of the gaze will introduce problems more specifically ocular vis-a-vis the object/other. This in turn will raise gaze/body/gender/subjectivity questions, especially as per Jacqueline Rose’s & Juliet Mitchell’s feminist readings of Lacan. Derrida’s early deconstruction of Levinas will open out onto a deconstructive turn toward ethics, in his “Adieu” to Levinas. Thereafter we consider Deleuze & Guattari’s anti-psychoanalytic philosophy as well as Zizek’s Lacanian riposte to Delueze & Guatarri. We conclude with a discussion of the relation of feminism and postmodernism as it pertains to our reading toward a philosophy of
art.
The IDSVA Independent Study program is designed to help the student develop particular scholarly interests and to integrate those interests with the overall curriculum. It is also meant to encourage exploration and extended research toward a dissertation topic. Finally, the Independent Study is meant to foster the skills and attitude necessary for successful scholarship. These include the wherewithal to plow ahead on one’s own as well as the willingness to seek advice and counsel from colleagues in the field. The student and Independent Study director work together toward the student’s professional development in the terms just noted.
There are no set rules for Independent Studies. Each individual student, each project, will require a different approach and different methods, with more or less communication and more or less oversight and guidance as necessary.
Year Two
In this residency seminar we revisit Kant and Hegel directly, with a close reading of the Guyer & Matthews contemporary translation of the Third Critique and Knox’s translation of Hegel’s two-volume collection of lectures on art. The purpose here will be to trace Kant’s and Hegel’s opposing strains of aesthetics as they develop into twentieth century aesthetic discourse, asking where we might locate a nexus point or moment of synthesis as regards the dialectical history of modern aesthetics that begins with Kant & Hegel. Of particular interest will be the question of the art object as materiality. This question will be circumscribed by the matter of aesthetics per se, and will in fact open out onto the wider fields of
contemporary philosophy & theory. Following the Spannocchia seminar the class will depart for Milan. There we will examine DaVinci’s recently restored “The Last Supper” from the standpoint of aesthetics and materiality, and we will visit the studios of several leading contemporary Italian artists, again bearing in mind the relation between aesthetics and substance. Milan’s rich and varied architecture will also provide an object of study.
Seminar IV, Part 2 traces the inheritance of Kant’s aesthetics (and, to a lesser extent, Hegel’s) in contemporary thinking on art and aesthetics. We will read one longer text by Jacques Derrida that takes up a key, if often overlooked, component of Kant’s Third Critique: the question of what is central or proper to the work of art, and what is peripheral or supplemental. We will then read a selection of essays by leading contemporary philosophers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, on the relevance of the aesthetic category of the sublime to contemporary theory and practice.
Seminar IV, Part 2 may be thought of as something of an interlude, a meditation, coming in between our discussion of Kant and Hegel at Spannocchia and the reading in theory and philosophy that we will be pursuing in the fall (Seminar IV, Part 3). As such it forms a topical and historical bridge from Part 1 of the Seminar to Part 3. The intent is to consider Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics from the standpoint of two or three specific problems. We will investigate these problems in order to evaluate the relevance of these systems, laid-out some two hundred-plus years ago, to our contemporary concerns. Having read both Kant and Hegel, directly and in depth, we will now read them along with and through the readings of other thinkers, philosophers who both utilize and problematize the methods
and assumptions that have been passed down through art and philosophy over the past two centuries.
In Seminar IV, Parts 1 & 2 we reengaged the aesthetics of Kant & Hegel and extended our discussion with a broad leap to contemporary thinking of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. In Seminar IV, Part 3 we will open these various issues to a much wider field of inquiry, cutting across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical discourse as we work our way into 20th and 21st century concerns: form, being, and ideology. The course moves across these issues toward an intertextual critique of tendencies in contemporary visual culture.
The IDSVA Independent Study program is designed to help the student develop particular scholarly interests and to integrate those interests with the overall curriculum. It is also meant to encourage exploration and extended research toward a dissertation topic. Finally, the Independent Study is meant to foster the skills and attitude necessary for successful scholarship. These include the wherewithal to plow ahead on one’s own as well as the willingness to seek advice and counsel from colleagues in the field. The student and Independent Study director work together toward the student’s professional development in the terms just noted.
There are no set rules for Independent Studies. Each individual student, each project, will require a different approach and different methods, with more or less communication and more or less oversight and guidance.
Seminar V begins with a six-day January intensive residency in New York City. Each morning visiting lecturers will deliver presentations concerning ethics within the context of a symposium on “Art, Ethnicity, and Globalization.”
Afternoons and evenings will be devoted to museum work (The Harlem Studio Museum, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and Dia Beacon) and student seminar presentations on fall Independent Studies. Independent Studies presentations will be given with a view toward linking those studies to questions raised in the Symposium Lectures.
The online section of the course will re-construe our question---what is art?---in terms of time, vis-a-vis Heidegger. This conceptual move will allow us to consider in more depth the historical development of the beautiful as a discourse of representation and to ask, to begin with, how Heidegger turns this development into an ethics of revealing. Fanon, Said, Arendt, Levinas, Lacan, Homi Bhabha, and Giorgio Agamben are tributaries to the discussion.
The IDSVA Independent Study program is designed to help the student develop particular scholarly interests and to integrate those interests with the overall curriculum. It is also meant to encourage exploration and extended research toward a dissertation topic. Finally, the Independent Study is meant to foster the skills and attitude necessary for successful scholarship. These include the wherewithal to plow ahead on one’s own as well as the willingness to seek advice and counsel from colleagues in the field. The student and Independent Study director work together toward the student’s professional development in the terms just noted.
There are no set rules for Independent Studies. Each individual student, each project, will require a different approach and different methods, with more or less communication and more or less oversight and guidance.
Year Three
This directed reading will examine major statements about the relation between verbal and visual representation from Lessing’s classic study Laocoön to contemporary theories of the semiotic and social construction of images. Special attention will be paid to important recent moments in this history (especially Joseph Frank’s influential theory of “spatial form” and Murray Krieger’s seminal argument about the aesthetic implications of “ekphrasis,” the depiction of painting in poetry) not only because of their significance in the “word-image” debate but also because of the light they shed on the aesthetic issues under dispute.
How do words and images represent? Do unique limits and possibilities characterize verbal and visual representation? For example, is linguistic representation necessarily temporal, unfolding in time from beginning to end according to the sequential demands of narrative? By contrast, is visual representation inherently spatial, a simultaneous rendering of parts in a synchronic whole? Or is representation in both domains governed by general semiotic, epistemological, or social and cultural factors that are constant across different media? What consequences do these questions have for aesthetic theory, artistic practice, and interpretation?
These issues have a long history in philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory. Our seminar will return to the readings examined in Directed Reading I, Part 1, now with seminar presentations and discussion leading us toward a deeper and more immediate grasp of the issues at hand.
Directed Reading I, Part 3 is titled Foundational Texts: Plato to Kristeva. It extends from the Word & Image Reading and the Brown Residency mini-seminar, Word & Image. Directed Reading I, Parts 1 and 2, brought together texts spanning the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, with a view toward developing an historical critique of the relation between spatial and temporal forms of aesthetic representation. The purpose of Directed Reading I, Part 3, Plato to Kristeva, is to situate the issues covered in Word & Image within an expanded field of earlier and more recent moments in philosophy and aesthetics.
Starting with Book Ten of Plato’s Republic and ending with Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, and traversing some twenty-five hundred years across the history of ideas, we go from the establishment of classical misogyny to the postmodern critique of patriarchy, from the critique of beauty as a corruption of truth to the celebration of corruption as an instance of the beautiful and the true. As we move across these philosophical horizons, taking up foundational texts as we go, we begin to see recurrent themes and emerging points of argument. Beyond the properly aesthetic question that asks, what is the relation between word and image, we now come to questions such as, what is truth, what is beauty, what is the relation between beauty and truth? While these broader
questions arise as the main issues informing a centuries-long debate, the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of these questions shift from one historical moment to the next, often coiling back on themselves in surprising, even shocking ways. In the end it remains for us to ask, where do we stand in the history of ideas? What is our contribution to the on-going dialogue?
In addition to developing the knowledge and skills requisite to addressing the above-posed questions, our larger learning goal is to integrate Directed Reading I with our first- and second-year seminar readings, to begin the work of shaping these readings into an organically threaded text. This narrative, which we call the history of ideas, is meant to inform our thinking in preparation for the oral examinations and to widen the theoretical scope of the thesis project.
Purpose: To prepare students for their third year of study, during which they will begin writing their dissertations (producing an outline in the fall and a first chapter in the spring).
Outcomes: At the end of the workshop, students should have near-final drafts of two documents:
a. A 15-page research statement that explains the intellectual problem to be addressed by the dissertation and that situates the dissertation in the larger field of inquiry in which the student will demonstrate competence in the qualifying examination. This statement will guide the student’s research during year three in preparation for this exam. The dissertation proposal, to be completed after the qualifying exam, will develop out of this statement in light of the third year’s reading and research.
b. A list of 25 books (or the equivalent) that will constitute the student’s initial proposal for the individualized section of the qualifying examination, supplementing the core list taken from the IDSVA curriculum. This list will be further modified, with the guidance and supervision of the IDSVA faculty, during the student’s reading and research during the third year.
In Seminar VI, Part 2 we will begin to shape your field statements and reading lists into a roadmap for your dissertation. The aim will be to stabilize your list of 25 titles that will be included on your oral qualifying exam, while also establishing a broader bibliography of books to be explored in the process of your research. We will work to hone your dissertation topic and to create an outline that will guide your ongoing research.
Directed Reading II extends from Directed Reading I, Part 3 (Foundational Texts: Plato to Kristeva). The purpose of Directed Reading II is to situate the issues covered in Directed Reading I, Part 3 within contemporary issues in philosophy, aesthetics, and art theory. As with Directed Reading I, Part 3, our problem remains to answer the question, What is our contribution to the on-going dialogue in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and art theory?
In Seminar VII we will generate a long-term work plan for dissertation research and writing. During the semester, you will write either an introduction or a first chapter of your dissertation. You will continue to read the titles on your list of twenty-five for the Preliminary Oral Examination. During one-on-one telephone calls and conference calls we will discuss techniques for efficient and sustainable research.
| |
