SHUM 4512 - The Aesthetics of Time

(crosslisted) ROMS 4512

Spring. 4 credits.

J. Strauss.

This course will explore time itself as an artistic material, concentrating on examples from French literature, architecture, and cinema of the last two centuries. The first section concentrates on the connections between smell and time in works by the theorists Etienne de Condillace and Walter Benjamin, the novelists Marcel Proust and Claude Simon, and the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard. In the second section, we turn to the differences between animal and technological time, studying texts by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the modernist architect Le Corbusier. The third section considers the idea of “granular time,” or time as it is articulated around the punctuality of the now, comparing writings by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire with works by the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Jacques Derrida.