Maladies of Attention: The Distracted Subject of Cinema
ENGL 355-01, Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m. Screenings: Sunday, 4- 6:30 Buttrick 102
Professor: Jennifer Fay
134 Buttrick
Office Hours: W 12:00-1:30 and by appointment
[email protected]
Course Description:
Jonathan Crary argues that the norms of attention have arisen in relation to the
reciprocal and inseparable phenomena of modern distraction. Paradoxically, distraction
may be a tool of attention, and thus attention, as a discrete category of perception, poses
several challenges to theorization. Moving across the 19th and 20th century and traveling
across the Atlantic, this course queries various modes of distraction that are intricated in
absorbed perception, specifically cinematic perception. It proposes to re-assess a few of
the canonical films and texts of film theory (realist, surrealist, feminist, Marxist…) that
are predicated on distinctions between spectacle and narrative, shock and absorption,
fragmentation and totality, and masculine and feminine feeling. The course will also
engage films and readings that are not typically theorized together. By pairing
theory/criticism and primary texts across a range of media, we will probe the thresholds
of modern perceptual, affective, and political states of mind.
To give but two examples: We will read Gustav Flaubert’s 1857 Madame Bovary with
Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experimental film Jeanne Dielman while reading chapters from
Elizabeth S. Goodstein’s Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (2005) in
order to understand the histories and forms of feminine and feminist boredom.
Similarly, at the interstices of attention and commitment, we will ponder the emaciated
body as a spectacle of suffering, a narrative of virtuosic self-mastery, an index of
oppression, as well as a sign of political withdrawal (in both senses of that word). We
will pair such texts as Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008), Franz Kafka’s 1922 “Hunger
Artist” and the writings and films of Brazilian Cinema Nova’s most outspoken theorists,
Glauber Rocha 1965 manifesto (“An Aesthetic of Hunger”) and Nelson Pereira dos
Santos for whom the depleted body finds its revolutionary representation in the “Sad,
ugly…screaming, desperate” cinema of the starving man. This class takes seriously such
attentive diversions as forgetfulness, indifference, boredom, repetition, disgust, and
ecstasy, and it will attempt to connect them to a range of modern political conditions
and affectations.
Required books:
All books are available at the Vanderbilt Bookstore and are on reserve at the Main
Library.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. SUN, 1988.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
MIT Press, 1999.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Eisenstein Reader. Ed., Richard Taylor. BFI, 1998.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. Penguin Books, 2003.
Hammond, Paul. ed. The Shadow & Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 3rd
Edition. City Lights, 2000.
Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of
History. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Kolnai, Aurel. On Disgust. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2004.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum Press, 2006.
Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings. Allan
Langdale, ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Recommended:
Siegfried Kracauer. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essay. Ed & Trans, Thomas Levin.
Harvard University Press, 1995.
Assignments:
Weekly Questions: For each of our Monday meetings please prepare a 150-300-word
(typed) reflection on the films and readings for the week. As these texts are, in some
weeks, rather disparate, you may focus on one particular detail, or work out some of the
ways these text may be connected, or query a problem or underlining assumption in a
text. Ideally, this reflection will be formulated as a substantial question or set of
questions followed by your own tentative answer. You might also briefly explain how
you arrived at this question. These short weekly writings will be the prompts for our inclass discussions and may inspire conference paper proposals and your seminar paper.
It will give me an opportunity to respond to your ideas and writing. And, as the
semester unfolds, these writings will help you track your own set of critical investments.
Seminar Paper: You have three options. All seminar papers should engage texts from
this class. You are welcome, indeed encouraged, to introduce other materials and to read
the seminar materials within the context of your interests and areas of specialization.
1. Option one: A 20-25 page seminar paper due Tues., December 13th.
2. Option two: Two 10- 15 page papers. The first due Friday, Oct. 28th by 5:00 p.m.,
the second due Tues., December 13th by 5:00 p.m.
3. Option Three: One 10-15 page paper due October 28th by 5:00 p.m., which you
then expand into a longer seminar paper due on Tues., December 13th by 5:00
p.m.
Robust class participation: I take class participation seriously as measure of your
engagement with the material. Come to every class prepared to ask questions, make
claims and connections.
Screenings: There are weekly screenings for assigned films. You are encouraged to
watch the film on a large screen, but they are also on reserve at the Main Library.
Reading Schedule:
Week 1 (Aug. 29): Modern Distraction
Crary, Suspensions of Perception Ch. 1 and 4.
Screening: Early Cinema in class.
Recommended: Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37:3
(Spring 2011). On Jstor.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659353 .
Week 2 (Sept. 5): World-Shaping and Attention
Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study
James, What is an Emotion?
Full Text: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/emotion.htm
Screening: Strike (Eisenstein, 1925, 82min.) Film to be discussed in Week 3
Week 3 (Sept. 12): Political Conditioning and the Affective Revolution
Eisenstein, “Expressive Movement” (OAK)
From The Eisenstein Reader:
Taylor, “Introduction”
The Montage of Attractions
The Montage of Film Attractions
The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form
Eisenstein on Eisenstein, the Director of Potemkin
The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film
Form)
Nieland, “Eccentric Types” (OAK)
Screening: Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925, 75 min).
Week 4 (Sept. 19): The Cult of Distraction
Kracauer, from The Mass Ornament:
Levin, Introduction (recommended)
The Mass Ornament
Calico-World
The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies
Film 1928
The Cult of Distraction
Hansen, “Ambivalence of the ‘Mass Ornament’: King Vidor’s The Crowd” OAK
Screening: The Crowd (Vidor, 1928, 98 min.)
Week 5 (Sept. 26): Immersion/ Distraction
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Howard Eiland, “Reception in Distraction” boundary 2 Volume 30, Number
1, Spring 2003, pp. 51-66. (Available on Project Muse)
Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork
Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992): 3-41. (Available on JSTOR)
Screening: Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935, 110 min.)
Week 6 (Oct. 3): Surrealist Shock Doctrine, or “the gift of violence.”
Hammond, L’Âge d’Or (OAK)
Essays from The Shadow & Its Shadow
Hammond, “Available Light”
Aragon/ On décor
Kyrou/ The Marvelous is Popular
Breton/ As in a Wood
Desnos/Picture Palaces
The Surrealist Group? Data Toward the Irrational Enlargement of a Film:
The Shanghai Gesture
Kyrou/ The Film and I
Legrand/ Female X Film= Fetish
Screening: Or: L’Âge d’Or (Buñuel, 1930, 60 min).
Highly recommended: The Shanghai Gesture (Sternberg, 1941, 99 min.)
Week 7 (Oct. 10): Interlude: Distribution of the Sensible
Rancière, Aesthetics and Politics
Rancière, “The Art of the Possible.” (OAK)
Week 8 (Oct. 17): Feminine Boredom
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Goodstein, Experience without Qualities, Introduction, Ch. 3
Screening: The Cook the Thief his Wife & Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989, 124 min.)
For our discussion of disgust
Recommended Reading:
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, Ch. 6.
Goodstein, Ch. 1 &2.
Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to be Killed” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008),
(OAK)
Week 9 (Oct. 24): Feminist Boredom and the Hyper-real
Mulvey, Laura. “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure”
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrat
ive+Cinema
Margulies, Ivone. two chapters from Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s
Hyperrealist Everyday OAK
Screening: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Ackerman, 1976,
201 min.)
Recommended Reading:
Solanas, Valerie. “S.C.U.M. Manifesto”
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
Week 10 (Oct. 31): Disgust and Rotten Politics
Kolnai, On Disgust
Brinkema, Eugenie. “Rot’s Progress: Gastromony according to Peter
Greenaway” difference: a journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol. 21, no. 5
Available on Highwire Press Duke University Press
Screening: Sweet Movie (Makavejev, 1974, 95 min.)
Recommended Reading:
Cavell, “On Makavejev and Bergman.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 6. No. 2 (Winter
1979) (Available on JSTOR).
Week 11 (Nov. 7): Colonial Taste
Selections from Chanan ed. Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Cinema and
Johnson, Stam, eds. Brazilian Cinema (OAK)
Rocha/ An Aesthetic of Hunger
Birri/Cinema and Underdevelopment
Solanas & Getino/Towards a Third Cinema
Espinosa/For an Imperfect Cinema
De Andrade/ Cannibalism and Self-Cannibalism
Peña/ How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
J. Swift, “A modest Proposal”
Avramescu, Catalin, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (select chapters on
OAK).
Screening: Como Era Gostoso o Meu Crancês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman,
dos Santos, 1972, 84 min).
Recommended screening: Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, dos Santos, 1963, 103 min),
on reserve.
*** Friday, November 11: Justus Nieland ***
Workshop at Penn Warren Center 12:00- 2:00, talk at 4:00 pm (room & title, TBA).
Week 12 (Nov. 14): The Aesthetics of Hunger
Kafka, “Hunger Artist”
Full text available: http://www.lundwood.u-net.com/ahunga.htm
Chapters from Maud Ellman, Hunger Artists (OAK)
Mieskowaski, Jan. “Kafka Live!” MLN Vol. 15, no. 5 (Dec. 2001). (Available on
Project Muse.)
Screening: Hunger (McQueen, 2008, 96 min.)
Week 13: Thanksgiving Break!
Week 14 (Nov. 28): Ecstasy
Bataille, Inner Experience
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 1-110.
Screening: La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Dreyer, 1928, 110 min.)
Week 15 (Dec. 5): Postscript: Playful Distraction/ Alienation
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle
Full text available: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/16
Screening: Playtime (Tati, 1967, 155 min)
December 8, Eugiene Brinkema at the Penn Warren Center 12- 2 p.m. title, TBA.
Final papers due Tuesday, Dec. 13, 5:00 p.m.