Senior Seminar

What is "reality"? How does the idea of realism change over time and in different media, from literature to photography to film and digital media? What are the political stakes of defining a given perspective as “real”? How are ideas of reality gendered and inflected by racialized forms?

In this course we will learn from the ways artists expressed their understanding of the mind and the self, from the changes that happened to the ideas of the real. We will give special attention to Japanese and French examples of literature, photography, and film—including animation/CGI—where the idea of the document and the trace, the remnant/fragment of the real, the relation between the real and the virtual take a central place.

This course pursues the above questions with the aim of giving students opportunities to develop skills using writing and other media as tools of inquiry. Students will enter the ongoing critical conversation on realism and media both transhistorically and cross-culturally. We will look at the ongoing conversations and the socio-political meanings of these versions of the real and realism as they move and evolve across time and space.