GERST 6235 - Intensity: Recent Critical Models

(crosslisted) COML 6033, ROMS 6235

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Taught in English.

E. Siegel.

Critical-aesthetic models about the role of art and literature in the search for the active, good, or just life are increasingly under pressure by the conditions of late capitalism, which assimilates ideas that once promised alternative ways of seeing or being: intensity, (a) liveness, singularity, presentness, fiction, documentation, subversion, even contemporaneity, autonomy, or action/activism have become norms for self-formation and team-work, for erasing the present by banking on futures. This seminar explores recent critical debates in German-speaking literary and art theory responding to this conundrum, attempting to rethink temporalities; notions of action and passivity; movements and collectives; the tension between autonomy and heteronomy; realism, fiction, facts, and documents. We will also investigate contemporary poetry and theater as major sites of experimentation.