Fall 2013
FALL 2013 MAP-UA 720 Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. O'Connor (Institute of Fine Arts) syllabus
The ancient Egyptians were prolific image makers, creating abundant statuary and a multitude of painted or relief compositions, often on an enormous scale. Architecture was also imagistic; the forms of temples, palaces and royal and elite tombs visually evoked features of the cosmic landscape, to signify that rituals and ceremonies were played out in accord with cosmological processes. In the Egyptian image world, societal and political issues were important, but its fundamental energy and richness arose from a creative tension deeply meaningful to all Egyptians. We explore the many forms of varied, yet interrelated images which convey the ancient Egyptiansʼ powerful and culture-shaping concerns about the interactions between Order (Egyptian Maat) and Chaos (Egyptian Isfet), and conclude by considering the reception of images of and from ancient Egypt in modernity.
FALL 2013 MAP-UA 722 Expressive Culture: Architecture in New York Field Study
Prof. Broderick (Art History) syllabus
New York's rich architectural heritage offers a unique opportunity for firsthand consideration of the concepts and styles of modern urban architecture, as well as its social, financial, and cultural contexts. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to prominent buildings. Attention is given both to individual buildings as examples of 19th- and 20th-century architecture and to phenomena such as the development of the skyscraper and the adaptation of older buildings to new uses.
FALL 2013 MAP-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. B. Cohen (Music) syllabus
Music in Cold War New York: Explores musical communities in early Cold War New York (1947-1965), with a special focus on music’s role in protest, cultural diplomacy, technical experimentation, and the imagination of alternate social realities. In the wake of World War II, the United States enjoyed heightened cultural prestige, and New York City became a mecca for innovation in concert, jazz, folk, and electronic music. At the same time, the early Cold War was a time of acute cultural restriction in the US, bound up by restrictive notions of American identity that served as a bulwark against perceived threats abroad and within. Against this backdrop of rapid transformation we consider musical developments in relation to the following conditions: the Red Scare, the expansion and globalization of advertising culture and commercial networks, decolonization, nuclear armament, the aftermath of the Holocaust, mass migrations, and the civil rights struggles of the era. Focusing on a wide range of sounds and aesthetics, we examine how musical thinkers participated in debates about freedom, democracy, propaganda, and totalitarianism. Musical dialogues with the visual arts and literature receive special attention, as do the resources of the city, involving attendance of and participation in musical concerts and happenings.
FALL 2013 MAP-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Oliver (Music) syllabus
Think about your favorite music, musician, song, and then think about the technologies that make them and your listening possible: microphones, recording studios, CDs, mp3 files, musical instruments, speakers, iPods, etc. Are these technologies essential to this music? Are they circumstantial? Some musical practices seem, at least at first sight, non-technological; others are overtly technological and use screens, speakers, computers, and other gadgets, as central aspects of their music. Focusing on experimental electronic and computer music and a diverse range of popular music produced in the 20th and 21st Century, we ask: What is music? What is sound? What is noise? What is music technology? Is music inherently technological? Is technology expressive?
Fall 2013 MAP-UA 740 Expressive Culture: Performance
Prof. Meineck (Classics & the Aquila Theatre) syllabus
Why do we still go to the theatre to watch plays? What is it about drama that can often seem to express so much about the tensions and stresses found in a given culture? Why does classical drama in particular continue to be performed and speak to so many different audiences? What is a classical play and how do theater artists interpret them for contemporary spectators, and why have so many works of drama been used to reflect the social, political, and economic situations of peoples all over the world? We explore the cultural significance of classical theater and how and why it continues to be performed today. We examine theater from four distinct period--ancient Athens, Elizabethan London, early modern Europe, and contemporary America--focusing on plays that are still regularly performed on contemporary stages. Students also take part in readings, exercises, and demonstrations, but they do not need to have any acting or performance ability.
FALL 2013 MAP-UA 750 Expressive Culture: Film (Visions of the Future)
Prof. Guerrero (Cinema Studies) syllabus
We screen, read and discuss a range of utopian/dystopian visions of the future as forecast in our popular cinema, and literature. Our screenings explore a range of films from from ‘sci fi’ to fantasy and horror, extending from the 1950s to the present, and far into the future. We explore varied questions and issues including the increasing prevalence of apocalyptic endings to present and future worlds; contrasts between a fragile democratic ‘now’ vs. an authoritarian techno-future; race, gender, and sexuality in the ‘scientifically’ engineered and overdetermined future; class, labor and social privilege among replicants, cyborgs, and humans; the consumption of virtual reality, cyber-sex, and other commodities; post-technological tribalism; future ‘hoods and cityscapes; warnings of cyber-surveillance, techno-collapse, and eco-disaster. And finally, we ask: what is ‘utopia,’ how is it ‘imagined,’ and is it still possible? We develop our seminar discussions, screenings and papers with readings from the likes of George Orwell, Ray Kurzweil, Paul Vrilio, and Aldous Huxley, among others.
Spring 2014
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 711 Expressive Culture: Graphic Novel
Prof. Borenstein (Russian & Slavic Studies) syllabus
Examines the interplay between words and images in the graphic novel, a hybrid medium with a system of communication reminiscent of prose fiction, animation, and film. What is the connection between text and art? How are internal psychology, time, and action conveyed in a static series of words and pictures? What can the graphic novel convey that other media cannot? Authors include Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Peter Milligan, Charles Burns, Carla Speed McNeil.
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 721 Expressive Culture: Painting and Sculpture in New York
Prof. Broderick (Art History) syllabus
New York's public art collections contain important examples of painting and sculpture from almost every phase of the past, as well as some of the world's foremost works of contemporary art. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to the museums or other locations where these works are exhibited.
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 720 Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Silver (Art History) syllabus
Avant-Garde New York, from the Armory Show to Andy Warhol. New York became the center of avant-garde art-making in the period just after the Second World War, although the city had been preparing for its modernist ascendancy since the early years of the 20th century. We focus on art and its makers--native New Yorkers and out-of-towners, Americans and foreign-born practitioners--who helped shape and refine New York’s extraordinarily rich avant-garde “tradition.” Painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, graphic artists, and set designers will be studied, including Alfred Stieglitz, Raymond Hood, Charles Demuth, Paul Manship, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Cornell, Helen Levitt, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Philip Johnson, and Andy Warhol, as will the context in which their work came into being and flourished--museums, galleries, art schools, patrons, artist neighborhoods, professional organizations, ad hoc associations, and artist “hangouts.” Topics include: the Stieglitz Circle and 291; The Armory Show (1913); the Paris/New York connection; the founding of the Museum of Modern Art; Marcel Duchamp and New York Dada; the art of the Harlem Renaissance; Frank O’Hara--poet, critic, curator; Street Photography; the birth of Abstract Expressionism; Avant-gardism in Washington Square--Judson Dance Theater; From Madison Avenue to 57th Street--Pop Art Emerges. Includes class excursions to museums, galleries, and other New York art sites.
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. B. Cohen (Music) syllabus
Music in Cold War New York: Explores musical communities in early Cold War New York (1947-1965), with a special focus on music’s role in protest, cultural diplomacy, technical experimentation, and the imagination of alternate social realities. In the wake of World War II, the United States enjoyed heightened cultural prestige, and New York City became a mecca for innovation in concert, jazz, folk, and electronic music. At the same time, the early Cold War was a time of acute cultural restriction in the US, bound up by restrictive notions of American identity that served as a bulwark against perceived threats abroad and within. Against this backdrop of rapid transformation we consider musical developments in relation to the following conditions: the Red Scare, the expansion and globalization of advertising culture and commercial networks, decolonization, nuclear armament, the aftermath of the Holocaust, mass migrations, and the civil rights struggles of the era. Focusing on a wide range of sounds and aesthetics, we examine how musical thinkers participated in debates about freedom, democracy, propaganda, and totalitarianism. Musical dialogues with the visual arts and literature receive special attention, as do the resources of the city, involving attendance of and participation in musical concerts and happenings.
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 750 Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Polan (Cinema Studies) syllabus
From silent cinema to the sound film, from early film to new waves in art cinema, from Weimar to emigré Paris to Hollywood, and across genres from the Western to the adventure story to the epic to the spy tale to film noir, Fritz Lang's movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema. Ranging across his career in film from Germany to the US and back to Europe, we look at both the diversity and the stylistic/thematic regularity in Lang's body of work to pinpoint how particularly he used cinema in the representation of the interplays of human initiative and the constraints on effective action.
SPRING 2014 CORE-UA 761 Expressive Culture: La Belle Époque
Prof. Ertman (Sociology)
La Belle Époque, that period in the life of France’s pre-World War I Third Republic (1871-1914) associated with extraordinary artistic achievement, not only saw Paris emerge as the undisputed Western capital of painting and sculpture, it also was the most important production site for new works of musical theater and, arguably, literature as well. It was during these decades that Impressionism launched its assault on the academic establishment, only itself to be superseded by an ever-changing avant-garde associated first with the nabis, then with fauvism and cubism; that the operas of Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Massenet and the plays of Sardou and Rostand filled the world’s theaters; and that the novels of Zola and stories of Maupassant were translated into dozens of languages. Finally, this was the society that gave birth to one of the greatest literary works of all time, Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, the first volume of which appeared just as the First World War was about to bring the Belle Époque to a violent end. Sources include reproductions of paintings, recordings of chamber music, opera and mélodies, and several of the most significant novels of the period.