Module Timetable 

 

Session 1 Wed 26 Sept: Introduction:

The reading list. David Macey Dictionary of Critical Theory Penguin 2000

The relation of theory to practice. The purpose of the lectures, weekly seminar write up requirements.

Lecture; Modernity/ism and postmodernity/ism definitions.

Fredric Jameson, Gray, Harvey, Hutcheon, Jenks, Appignanesi

Screening: Modern Times -Charlie Chaplin -to Post Fordism The Shock Doctrine M.Winterbottom/N. Klein

“Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.”

Stanford ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY 2005

http://plato.stanford.edu/

Session 2 Wed 3 Oct: : The beginning of critical theory: The Frankfurt School,

Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin

“Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. [Could this be a reference to the cat’s nine lives in Sylvester the Cat-egorical Imperative?] All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological truth reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self- electors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.”

Adorno/Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Viewing: From Tom and Jerry to Itchy and Scratchy- the analysis of cartoons and capitalist production.

Session 3 Wed 10 Oct: Modernist practices: realism and formalist challenges to narrative 

Todorov, Propp, Bakhtin, Russian Formalism, Lukacs, Brecht, Collins.

Diagesis and narrative, narration, distanciation, surrealism.

Viewing: Wavelength Michael Snow, Meshes of the Afternoon Maya Deren., Man With A Movie Camera Dziga Vertov Reading: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino.

Session4 Wed 17 Oct: Modern practices: gender, ideology and race 

Wollstonecraft, De Bouvoir, Marx, Althusser, Fanon.

Viewing: Film: Invisible Adversaries -Valie Export, Fanon- Isaac Julien, Hour of the Furnaces

Octavio Getino, Fernando E. Solanas

 

Session5 Wed 24 Oct: Crises of modernity: from progress and liberation to totalitarian prison house.

Lyotard, Jameson, Carey, Gray, Hobsbawm

Viewing: Our Daily Bread Nikolaus Geyrhalter 

  

Session 6Wed 31 Oct: Structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism and the analysis of meaning.

Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Williamson. Image as Text: the critique of meta narratives, intertextuality, differance. Viewing: Advertising and subversion of advertising messages, appropriation work.

Wed 7 Nov: No Class-Course Committee

Session 7 Wed 14 Nov: Surveillance, spectacle, simulation

Benjamin, Debord, Foucault, McLuhan, Baudrillard

Viewing:Truman Show-Peter Wier/Blade Runner-Ridley Scott 

submit CW1-19 Nov 

Session 8 Wed 21 Nov: Psychoanalysis in film, feminism and cultural reading:

Butler, Sherman, Pollock, Mulvey, Mitchell, Rose, Freud, Zizek, Lacan

The gaze, narcissism, voyeurism, advertising, masquerade, identity, ‘the subject’.

Viewing: Tomb Raider/ Cosmetic Surgery Live, Guerilla Girls, Thriller Michael Jackson +look-alikes(Naomi Harris):

Session 9 Wed 28 Nov: The Postmodern Era – fundamental break or just more modern?

Warhol Multiples: The Break with the Modern and The cult of personality-

Ref John A Walker, Gablik, Walter Benjamin, Warhol

Viewing: Brazil-Terry Gilliam, The Day Today- Morris, Ianucci BBC, From Duchamp to Pop Art.-Arte video 93-8

Session 10 Wed 5 Dec: “The End of History” the end of everything

Critical practices in Postmodernism, grand narratives and the era of the postmodern. Figures of the postmodern: irony, pastiche, Fukuyama, Hutcheon, Lyotard, Jameson, Harvey

Viewing: D-i-a-l History –J.Grimonprez –Life of Brian, Monty Python.