AJ25029 Frenzies of the Visible: Literature and Spectatorship in the 19th Century

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2006
Extent and Intensity
0/0/0. 2 credit(s) (plus 2 credits for an exam). Recommended Type of Completion: zk (examination). Other types of completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
Bonita Rhoads, M.A. (lecturer), Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A. (deputy)
Guaranteed by
Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Tomáš Hanzálek
Timetable
Wed 15:00–16:35 G22
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is only offered to the students of the study fields the course is directly associated with.

The capacity limit for the course is 15 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/15, only registered: 0/15
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 7 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
In the wake of Walter Benjamin's essays, modernity has been steadfastly identified with the fantastic expansion of visual experience through innovations of every cast: photography, consumerism, mass entertainment, tourism. This course attempts to scrutinize the spectrum of nineteenth century visual culture through an array of emblematic critical perspectives and through the prism of literature. For example, well consider De Certeau's contention that we "pay for the ocular domination of space by losing our footing." In other words, do modern modes of visual production and consumption beleaguer the observer, requiring the individual to ceaselessly decipher the tangle of images saturating the metropolis? Does sight then become a disreputable sense, granting admission to a sinister field of perceptual distortions? Or (to counter such categorical accounts of lost referentiality) does modernity give rise to entirely new faculties of visual discernment: exilic (Poes detective), aesthetic (Baudelaires flaneur/James artist), individualistic (Emersons transparent eyeball)? To whom does vision belong? On whom is it leveled? Indeed, is there such a thing as a female voyeur? How do we map the terrain of modern visual culture along lines that regard the complexity with which private and public, subject and object, the scopic and sexual intersect?
Syllabus
  • 8/10: House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne PT 1 Camera Lucida*, Roland Barthes On Photography*, Susan Sontag 15/10: House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne PT 2 Seeing and Believing: Hawthornes Reflections on the Daguerretype, Alan Trachtenberg Techniques of the Observer*, Jonathan Crary Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson 22/10: The Man of the Crowd & The Mystery of Marie Roget, Poe On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin Metropolis and Mental Life, Georg Simmel 29/10: Sister Carrie, Dreiser PT 1 Society of the Spectacle*, Guy Debord Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola*, Rachel Bowlby 5/11: Sister Carrie, Dreiser PT 2 Veiled Ladies: Towards a History of Antebellum Entertainment, Richard Brodhead Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art*, Griselda Pollock 12/11: The Real Thing & The Private Life, James Simulations*, Jean Baudrillard 19/11: MiddleMarch & Daniel Deronda (excerpts: tableaux), Eliot Confidence Men and Painted Women, Karen Haltunnen Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey 26/11: Great Expectations, Dickens PT 1 Panopticism, Michel Foucault Scopic Regimes of Modernity*, Martin Jay 3/12: Great Expectation, Dickens PT 2 Struggles and Triumphs*, P.T. Barnum 10/12: Great Expectations, Dickens PT 3 The Practice of Everyday Life*, Michel De Certeau 17/12: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey PT 1 The Painter of Modern Life*, Charles Baudelaire 21/12: Confessions of an English Opium, De Quincey Eater PT 2 The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, Janet Wolff The Frenzy of the Visible*, Jean Louis Comolli
Assessment methods (in Czech)
Assessment: regular attendance, participation in discussion, one seminar presentation and a 3, 500 word term essay due on 1/10.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
The course can also be completed outside the examination period.
The course is taught only once.
The course is also listed under the following terms Spring 2007.
  • Enrolment Statistics (Autumn 2006, recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/phil/autumn2006/AJ25029