Timetable
Monday 10.00-13.00 hr
Lipsius building, room 001
Method of Instruction
Seminar
Description
How to come to terms with the mind-boggling diversity of the visual and verbal arts of globalisation? This course invites students to participate – on a professional level – in the passionate but complex academic discourses that address these intruiging arts. Taking six important essays from a leading journal in the field (Third Text) as your point of departure, you will learn to differentiate the varying discourses on six different artistic and literary case studies (ranging from the relation between African traditional art, anthropology and surrealism, to the Buddhist elements in Indian documentaries, and the aesthetics of horror in Palestine art). In the two three-hour seminars that are dedicated to each case study, we will begin by close-reading an essay from Third Text, and confront it with essays that present a radically different approach. In this way, you will reflect on questions such as: Does Third Text succeed in addressing -the complex cultural realities that emerge when different worldviews meet, and the challenge this poses to Eurocentrism and ethnocentric aesthetic criteria, as is stated in its Editorial? To what extent is the global debate on art shaped by poststructuralism? To what extent may alternative approaches, inspired by local practices, also be productive? Which theoretical discourses respond to the agendas of the artists, writers, thinkers and activists in the less privileged regions of the world?
In addition, we will explore what happens when we read a work of art within a regional, a national, a transnational or a global framework. Why do some critics insist that works of art express a well-defined cultural identity, while others criticize the notion of cultural identity in art theory? How should we understand the tensions between the materialist and -culturalist approaches to the global imagination?
To answer these questions, two teachers (specialized in literature and art, respectively) will offer you the insights and information needed to contextualize the art under discussion, for example by showing landmark films from Africa, or teaching a crash course in contemporary West African visual art. In addition, they will offer historical and theoretical reflections to create an understanding of the issues that are at stake in debates about the arts of globalisation.
We hope to welcome you not as listeners, but as young researchers-to-be. You are expected to participate actively by contributing to the debate, writing short responses to assignments, and by producing a final paper or artistic response to the issues that are explored during the course.
Required reading
James Elkins (ed.). Is Art History Global? New York: Routlegde, 2007. 0415 97785 1 (soft cover)
Examination
Paper
Information
Dr. Isabel Hoving
Dr. Nanne Timmer
Or: Secretary’s office of Pallas, Institute for Art-historical and Literary Studies, P.N. van Eyckhof 3, room 104a; Telephone: +31 (0)71 5272166; E-mail: pallas@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Students are requested to register at the Pallas office.