ENGL 423 - History in Theory

Institution:

Williams College

Subject:

English

Description:

Moments of political turmoil expose the contested and highly charged ways in which a culture structures itself around an imagined past, a process that some of the most interesting theorists of the past two hundred years have helped to illuminate. In this course, we will read their work along with literary and cinematic texts that invoke such moments of upheaval--the French and Russian Revolutions as well as those of 1848, the rise of fascism and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the battle for Algerian independence, the AIDS crisis--in order to lay bare the problems and contradictions that emerge in those fraught narratives of the past. We will consider such issues as the aesthetics of fascism and of democracy under pressure, fantasies of decolonization, and the uses of melancholy in representing historical loss. Readings will be drawn from literary works by Austen, Eliot, Kafka, Mann, Borges, Stoppard, and Kushner, and theoretical essays by Kant, Burke, Carlyle, Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefort. Films will include such works as Eisenstein's October, Reifenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, Wellman's Nothing Sacred and Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. This course is conceived for students who have already taken a criticism course, but those students who have yet to do so are welcome

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

A 300-level course or permission of the instructor

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Seminar

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.williams.edu

Phone Number:

(413) 597-3131

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Four-one-four plan

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