17388

Ü-Negotiating Gender: Aesthetic Theory: Undoing Binaries

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

In the mid-eighteenth-century, German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten used the word ‘aesthetics’ to denote what he referred to as “the science of sensory knowledge”. On this understanding, the study of aesthetics is the study of something sensed, rather than something imagined or reasoned. In its most fundamental sense, aesthetics is about the experience of things in the world – one that relies on the interaction between the body and the mind to mediate this experience. As a means of re-presentation, aesthetic judgment can also be seen as a way of ordering the world, and the others in that world. In the eighteenth century, this was a process that was underwritten by binary oppositions (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature – ones that demarcated gender and sexuality in oppositional terms, thus reinscribing certain identity categories as fixed and unchangeable. In the twentieth century, however, these divisions came to be questioned by theorists and writers who viewed aesthetic experience are more malleable and complicated than their predecessors would have it. With a focus on the aesthetic category of the sublime (as an experience of empowerment), this course examines the ways in which writers and thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present day have negotiated the binaries that inform and mediate aesthetic experience. Over the course of the semester, students will interrogate a range of theories from the traditional Burkean and Kantian sublime, to postmodern rearticulations by Lyotard, Derrida, and Ranciere, as well as Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, in order to consider the political and ethical ramifications of destabilizing the binaries that underwrite aesthetic experience and the imagining of selves with others in the world.

NB: This subject is run in conjunction with MA-HS 17387. Students are required to enrol in both parts of the module in order to participate in the course.

Set Texts:

Kaminsky, Ilya. Deaf Republic.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818 Edition.
Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel.

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the commencement of semester.

Schließen

14 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Di, 16:00 - 18:00 14 Termine

Di, 15.04.2025 16:00 - 18:00

Dozenten:
Prof. Dr. Jennifer Wawrzinek