Reflections Seminars: Winter 2017
World as Stage and Screen
- Tuesday, 14:00 – 18:00 and Thursday 16:30 to 18:00
- English + Humanities (J.A. Shea, English; Greg Polakoff, Humanities)
- Credits: English 603-102-MQ and Humanities 345-102-MQ
The Renaissance and the twentieth century were revolutionary times. They were times distinguished by ground-breaking scientific discoveries, new technologies, and wars fought in the name of grand ideologies. This course examines the revolutionary performing arts of these two periods. The English component of the course will focus on the plays of Shakespeare as they dialogued with Renaissance art and society, but also influenced contemporary film, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Julie Taymor’s Titus. The Humanities component of the course will focus on modernist theater and film, notably the highly political plays of Bertolt Brecht, but also writers such as Peter Weiss and Antonin Artaud, as well as filmmakers such as Peter Brook and Leni Riefenstahl. Both components will examine how these writers and directors responded to the turbulent times in which they lived through the innovative use of language and provocative staging. Students will be encouraged to produce creative works of their own and participate in readings.
The Weird Tradition: Worldview, Aesthetics, Genre
- Wednesday 14:00-18:00 and Thursday 15:00 to 16:30
- English and Humanities (Kristopher Woofter, English; Gray Miles, Humanities)
- Credits: English 603-102-MQ and Humanities 345-102-MQ
Is the world a place of order, familiarity, moral facts, and reasonable explanations? Or is it true that our experience can be characterized by instability, unnameable dread, drastic breaks with “the real,” and crepuscular feelings and forms that never quite allow themselves to be known? Does something Weird this way come? The Worldview of the Weird proposes that not all experiences can be categorized and rendered into digestible, communicable information. That the tragedy of a brave man’s relapse into the worst parts of his nature can result in a program for death so personal and so uncanny that only the supernatural can countenance it. That obedience to the workings of desire can drive you mad. That we live in a universe where fate and prediction are cooked up by spirits, the kinds of spirits who tend to come alive in the dark hollows of the human mind. That some true stories cleave to the diabolical, allowing human motivation to be lost and found in the mists of enchantment. And that Samuel Taylor Coleridge caught it the right way when he said that “This language [of the Weird] is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death.” The Humanities portion of this paired course will explore the Weird tradition as a worldview in these and other contexts.
The Weird tradition is most often associated with the works of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who first named and theorized it, but it also derives from any work that generates a sense of cosmic horror. Where the Gothic tradition tends towards the hauntological, or uncanny, the Weird tends towards the radically other, undefinable abcanny, though its sublime terrors are often a combination of both. Most important for the Weird tradition is the sense that humanity is an insignificant, ephemeral blot on something much larger, much greater, something all-engrossing, all-consuming. The implications extend beyond morals and into the very mysteries and significance (or lack thereof) of human existence against deep history. The Weird is thus somewhere between a sub-genre that combines horror, dark fantasy and science fiction, and a worldview that often derives its critique from a nihilistic and negativistic philosophical take on reality. We will explore these and other questions in literary works by William Blake, William Shakespeare, Edgar Poe, Emily Dickinson, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, China Mieville, and others, along with several films.
Dante and Cinematic Horror
- Tuesday, 11:30 to 13:00 and Thursday, 10:00 – 14:00
- English and Humanities (Kristopher Woofter, English; Jean Coleno, Humanities)
- Credits: English 603-BXE-DW and Humanities 345-BXH-DW
This paired Humanities and English course introduces students to some of the most influential theories and concepts in both ethics and horror cinema, respectively. It relates general theories and concepts to specific ethical debates, and it familiarizes students with key controversies in the history of ethics. In parallel, this course explores the key theories essential to understanding cinematic works of horror, with an eye towards what might be termed a “horror ethics.”
The Humanities portion of this paired course will begin by examining three influential ethical theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics. Students will then explore the ethical views put forward in Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Most of the semester will be devoted to a close study of this work, which gives a vivid, detailed, and influential presentation of virtue ethics. Students will read all of the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy, along with excerpts from the other two sections, Purgatory and Paradise. Throughout the semester, connections will be made between the Humanities and English portions of the paired course.
The English portion begins with an overview and definition of genre studies, and, in particular, how horror has been framed and discussed by genre theorists and historians. We then move on to a discussion of the supposed “paradoxical” pleasures of horror viewing. Other major concepts that complicate this notion of the horror aesthetic and poetics as somehow paradoxically pleasurable will include Freud’s conceptualization of the uncanny, and other theoretical concepts such as the monstrous-feminine, affect theory, attractions theory, eco-criticism, feminist criticism, and other key approaches, including what might be termed a “horror ethics.”
Films will reflect the Humanities focus on Dante and ethics, and may include: L’Inferno (1911), Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (1922), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Beyond (1980), Inferno (1980, Dario Argento), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Hellraiser (1987), Event Horizon (1997), The Burning Moon and No Reason (1992 and 2010 Olaf Ittenbach), The Act of Killing (2012), Unfriended (2015) and It Follows (2015).
Questions? Contact Michael Duckett, Reflections co-ordinator: by Omnivox or mduckett@dawsoncollege.qc.ca.
