ENGL 6725 - Aesthetics and Politics of Touch

(crosslisted) COML 6920, PMA 6920

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

T. Murray.

The course will consider the aesthetic and politics of “touch” in dialogue with critical, artistic innovations.. Emphasizing differentiations between interactivity and immersion in art and theory, the course will discuss renewed critical emphasis on the legacy of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze to affect theory) in dialogue with recent writings on global critical race and sexual theory (Mbembe, Stoever, Ganguly, Lalu, Moten, Spillers, Cardenas). Designed as an archive-based course, students will be invited to shape the second part of the syllabus around works featured in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and in the 2018 CCA Biennial on “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival” with the aim of staging a theory/practice final exhibit/performance based on conceptual approaches to “touch.”