Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of the counter-traditions in human civilization and thought, including impulses and movements that critique and resist dominant value systems. Focuses on writers, artists and thinkers that break with their traditions creating new values, ideas, and forms of experience and expression. May be repeated for credit when a different topic is taught. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

“The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same […]”
(T. Adorno, Minima Moralia)

“Now is the age of anxiety.”
(W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety)

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
(Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings)

“I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear.”
(Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa)

NEGATIVE AFFECTS: FEAR, AGGRESSIVITY, ANXIETY, IRRITATION …

We live in fast changing and troublesome times, where the word ‘crisis’ has lost its ability to capture the sense of danger on a planetary level (i.e., danger of war, economic insecurity, environmental catastrophes, or precarious labour), the sense of erosion of social stability, a perceived loss of agency, and the loss of hope for better futures. It is perhaps at such times that what literary theorist Sianne Ngai has termed “ugly feelings,” or negative affects, become more prominent both in social discourse and in individuals’ emotional relation to the world. Such feelings are not a novelty, and in fact we can map their resurgence (or higher visibility) at very specific historical moments—for example, what writer Stefan Zweig called the end of “the age of security” at the turn of the 20^th century, after the dreams of social progress and scientific rationality of the 19^th century had come to an abrupt end. While it is important to be aware of the historical nature of affects (which emotions become more prominent and when), we do not find any consolation in such knowledge: negative affects always absorb our emotional, psychic and bodily energy, seemingly stealing from us the possibility of hope and the imagination of a different future. They freeze us in the experience of the moment. They make us suffer. They make us feel on a bodily level that, as living beings, we are “thrown into the world” and the world has become, to dub the title of Jeff Wall’s photographic artwork, a “stumbling block.” Yet it is precisely at these moments that they also cross path with the inquiring method of the humanities: affects tell us something of where we are beyond the chatter of everyday discourses (including university discourses), and the analysis of affects may help us understand why we feel the way we do, how these feelings (assumedly an ‘individual’ problem) are more widespread and thus more social than we realize, and what discourses, ideologies, and structures feed the conditions that make the emergence of these affects possible. In short, of what are affects symptomatic? What happens when the affect of the other is denied? Can negative affects (especially fear) be mobilized for political gain? Can we reroute them toward different possibilities? What is the role of understanding and the imagination at such times of crisis?

In this course, we will use the tools of the humanities (a multi- and interdisciplinary methodology across the fields of history, social thought, literature and the arts, and philosophy) to address some of the prevalent negative affects of our time: fear, aggressivity, anxiety,  irritation, disgust, chronic fatigue … We will use the material from arts and literature, history, media, and cultural theory from different decades and different cultural contexts to address a variety of social and cultural instances that will help us enter the folds and difficult fault lines of our bodily and emotional world—a world that is simultaneously uniquely individual (or ‘singular’) and unavoidably social.

No prior knowledge in the humanities is required for this course, but students are expected to be open and willing to venture into topics that are sometimes difficult to be discussed in a public setting. We are here to learn together and produce knowledge together in the spirit of generosity and collaboration. Openness to ideas, experiences, and worldviews is a sign of beauty (or a particular understanding of beauty), perhaps our only way out (and in this sense the course works both at the level of cognition and at the level of experience); or, as Dostoevsky once said, “beauty will save the world.”

This course counts for upper-level B-HUM and W-credits.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

At the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate their proficiency in the following activities:

1. Read and analyze Humanities texts critically, creatively, and to academic standards by using an interdisciplinary approach.
2. Analyze the social and cultural politics of affect, with a focus on negative affects, in the broad contemporary age and across cultural boundaries.
3. Think critically about negative affects in relation to emotions constructed as ‘positive’ (e.g., happiness).
4. Think critically about the entanglement of negative affects with subjection, violence, anthropocentrism, and social hierarchies, but also the creation of a social bond and political action.
5. Develop research skills in the interdisciplinary field of the Humanities.
6. Develop a sustained, persuasive, logical and well-structured argument in academic essay writing.
7. Communicate information and ideas clearly and confidently in oral activities.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Screenings:

• In My Country (dir. John Boorman, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson), 2004
• Bones and All (dir. Luca Guadagnino, starring Taylor Russell and Thimotée Chalamet), 2022
• Wedding in Galilee (عرس الجليل, Urs al-Jalil) (dir. Michel Khleifi, starring Ali M. El Akili, Makram Khouri, Nazih Akleh, Anna Achdian, Tali Dorat), 1987

Selected readings in addition to the required readings listed below will be available on Canvas or electronically.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: