The encounter with time, which we refer to as temporality, shapes our very sense of being in the world. Some writers (Proust) put the accent on the past tense; others put it on the future (Heidegger); and still others, the present (Gertrude Stein). In this program, we will consider the encounter with temporality as explored in poetics, philosophy, and critical theory alongside various experiments with rhythm, duration, and speed through time-based arts like film and photography.
We will study works of literature and of theory that raise pertinent questions about our sense of being, becoming, and the experience of time. How do words and images navigate time differently? What do different conceptions of time reveal about our sense of memory, nostalgia, or futurity? What’s in the impulse to slow things down, or to speed things forward? How do different languages account for time, and how might they translate from one to the other, as well as from word to image and back again? Special emphasis will be placed on critical conceptions of “slow duration” as a turning point in modernist expression. Longer readings will include Marcel Proust's Recollections of Things Past and Gertrude Stein's Collected Writings. We will read and discuss works by Walter Benjamin, Kamau Brathwaite, and Lydia Davis, among others. We will reflect on these ideas in cinema as well through the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Robert Bresson, Chantal Ackerman, Maya Deren, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasathakul and Wong Kar Wai. Writing assignments in this class will be both creative and essayistic in nature.
Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:
12 - Poetics
4 - Cinema Studies
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Academic Details
Writing, Publishing