60-389 Violence and Visual Representation

9 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This course will take a critical approach to writing and films that probe the relationship between violence and artistic representation. For our learning purposes, and relevant to the intensity of our subject matter, critical here describes a fundamentally feminist, antiracist method aimed at generating specific, expansive thought. Selected texts will deal with pain, torture, revenge, andor brutality, but they will also explore notions of gender and sexuality, nation and history, and politics and aesthetics. We will consider affective responses to violence, ranging from numbness to disgust we will consider ways in which violence is thought to be functional, or fundamentally without purpose we will approach violence as an aesthetic subject, cataloging its forms and mapping its resistance to representation. Ultimately, we will use these lines of inquiry to question violence itself what is violence What does it mean to know it when we see it And how does that recognition define us Though we will focus on contemporary works of criticism, film, and visual art, this course will hopefully give you a ground for thinking about transgression and extremity across a variety of historical, national, and even disciplinary borders.

Prerequisites: none listed

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