Studies in the Relations Between Literature and the Other Arts

What are the promises that come to us through the media, new and old, and how do they deliver or disappoint? How do they mediate the “changes in the air” we experience around key cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, race, labor and class, political engagement and social change? What place do our media practices have in shaping a better world, and how do they make a difference in our own ways of knowing and naming what we feel and experience?

Through a range of examples, both historical and contemporary, from the U.S., Europe, and East Asia, from literature, theater, mass media (magazines and radio) through internet platforms and apps, we will study these questions and open out a new way of framing an understanding of the intersecting worlds of feeling (affect) and media.  Media theory has often ignored gender and race as well as cultures outside the U.S. and Europe. Our seminar will push against that bias and make a gendered, culturally rebalanced intervention into the field of literary, cultural, and media studies. We will also touch on our own ‘media practice’ and deepen our study through a workshop for prototyping our own app. Key topics include: melodrama, media theory and temporalities, capture, plasmaticity in anime, mood, ambient and East Asian media, performative and time-based arts, landscape theory, television drama, and paranoia.

Readings drawn from Berlant, Sedgwick, Marx, Foucault, Proust, Kano, Tomii, Eisenstein, Bourdaghs, Lukacs, Nakahira, Ngai, Chun, Chow, and more.

Hope to see you there!