Topics vary each semester. Fall 2018: Since it was not translated into English until the mid 1960s, Walter Benjamin s Work of Art essay was slow to arrive in the English-speaking world, and when it did, it seemed part of the same zeitgeist as Guy Debord s The Society of the Spectacle, Roland Barthes The Rhetoric of the Image, and Louis Althusser s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. This zeitgeist was deeply suspicious of popular images, and this suspicion was soon fortified from a feminist direction by Laura Mulvey s Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and a postcolonial one by Frantz Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks. Benjamin s essay extended it to the kinds of images we generally find in museums, i.e., to what I will be calling pictures. This made the museum the primary target of institutional critique, and gave rise to what Hal Foster called the anti-aesthetic. It was against this backdrop that the so-called Pictures Generation emerged. This category was helpful at first, since it allowed us to look at things that would otherwise have been forbidden. It was based, however, on a misapprehension: the misapprehension that a picture means the same thing for Jeff Wall as it does for Cindy Sherman.

Topics vary from year to year.

Seminar on selected topics in music theory and analysis.

Specific topic varies. The seminar will bring together the study of early modern English literature and culture with histories and theories of gender, sexuality and race. Contact with 'the East' (Turkey, the Moluccas, North Africa and India) and the West (the Americas and the Caribbean) reshaped attitudes to identity and desire. How does this history allow us to understand, and often interrogate, modern theories of desire and difference? Conversely, how do postcolonial and other contemporary perspectives allow us to re-read this past?