Sections offered FALL 2019:
#1422 |
EYAL PERETZ |
MW 4:00pm-5:15pm |
WH 104 |
COURSE ATTRIBUTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit. This class meets with CMLT-C 347.
Who are we (that is, who are we human beings, what is our nature) and how do we BECOME who we are? This is the guiding question that this class will try to answer. What this question implies is that though we have a certain nature, it is not clear that we know how to fulfill it, thus that we know how to fully be ourselves, that we know how to live the life we are called to live. The basic hypothesis that will guide us is that the modern era, by which we will understand the era stretching from the Renaissance to our own days, has started to raise this guiding question, the origins of which are ancient, in a new way. Another hypothesis that will guide us is that one of the fundamental places in which humanity tried to learn to become what it is, and to fulfill its nature in a new way, is in works of art. Art, we will argue, in its modern development, and perhaps in a paradigmatic way in the modern projects of the self portrait in painting, film, and photography, and the modern project of autobiography, is nothing but the attempt to develop new means through which humanity can come to itself, and learn to live the life it is called to live but never knew how.
We will take a look at a very wide ranging selection of works, from the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt to the self portraits of Andy Warhol, from the autobiographies of Enlightenment writer Jean Jacques Rousseau to the autobiographical works of William Wordsworth and Marcel Proust, and from the self portraits in film of Charlie Chaplin to those of Orson Welles, from the theater of Shakespeare to that of Beckett, and many more works, photographs, selfies, YouTube clips, etc.