Reading & Composition

One of the earliest articulations of the concept for the body politic appears in the work of the Ancient Greek philosophers, who establish the body as an analogy for the political apparatus, describing political malaise in terms of bodily disease and state fragmentation in terms of amputation.  Historical and contemporary discussions of the relationship between body and state draw on a common language—of illness, of conquest and penetration, of love and desire—that highlights a metaphorical and literal dialogue between the human body and structures/technologies of power.

In this course, we will consider myriad representations of the body from different historical moments and artistic modes as we think about the ethical and political consequences of how bodies are marked, coded, observed, and interpreted.  Why does it matter how bodies are represented? What do such representations, literary and visual, suggest about how different bodies are configured in relationship to tangled networks of power and conceptions of identity–individual, communal, national, and global?  And what does this suggest about the possibility for negotiation, self-fashioning, and resistance?

We will explore these questions in relationship to a variety of mediums including literature, photography, film, and comics.

Tentative Reading and Viewing List:

(Please do not buy books before the first day of class.)

The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492-1493

Os Sertoes, Euclides da Cunha

The Human Stain, Philip Roth

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig

Short stories by Clarice Lispector, Juan Rulfo

Sections of theoretical works by Foucault, Bakhtin

Comic Book, TBA

Selection of Ethnographic Photographs

Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel

Todo sobre mi madre, Pedro Almodóvar