COML 4176 - Still Life: Animals, Technology, Representation

(crosslisted) ROMS 4176, VISST 4176
(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Core Course for Comparative Literature Majors.

A. Traisnel.

The language of “capture” left hunting and military idioms at the end of the 19th century to pervade today’s aesthetic, scientific, technological and critical lexicons. This course examines how this leap from the literal to the metaphorical signaled a sea change in the representation of animal life. Looking at an array of literary, artistic and philosophical texts, the course surveys key contributions to thinking through how mechanized technologies of capture (microscopes, photography, cinema, microphones, etc.) informed and transformed our modern conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity, art and non-art, reality and virtuality, life and death, the animal and the human. Authors may include Flaubert, Poe, Welty, Muybridge, Marey, von Uexküll, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Herzog, Crary, Chow, Rancière, Haraway.