THETR 4440 - [Gossip]

(crosslisted)
(also ENGL 4640, FGSS 4420) (LA-AS)

4 credits.

Next offered 2012-2013. Co-meets with ENGL 6641/FGSS 6420/THETR 6440.

N. Salvato.

Literary and cultural theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described gossip as a “devalued art” that ought to be revalued for “projects of nonce taxonomy, of the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.” In this graduate seminar, we will focus attention on the philosophical traditions in which gossip has been devalued, as well as on its more recent revaluations by theorists like Sedgwick. As we investigate the ways in which gossip may produce provisional maps of the world, we will occasionally pair philosophical and theoretical texts with their literary, theatrical, and filmic complements. Key authors include Kant, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Barthes.