This is what I hope my final semester at BC will look like. There are a couple of administrative hurdles to jump thanks to a mix-up with my registration, but I'm optimistic since they involve overrides for closed courses from profs. who know me. It's a go!!
1. Honors Thesis
2. The Religious Quest: Comparative Perspectives (Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity) (theology requirement)
3. Beyond Tradition:Experimental Arts/20th Century
This interdisciplinary course will focus on several key figures whose experimental
work has challenged the most basic conventions of Western culture and aesthetics.
Particular attention will be given to Marcel Duchamp, whose artwork and
writings have inspired several generations of artists and critics interested
in experimentation in the arts. Duchamp's long career will be contextualized
as we study other examples of European avant-garde practice in the early
decades of the century , and the explosion of American experimentation and
collaboration in the arts in the 1960's. We will pursue such topics as the
role of chance, collage aesthetic, collaboration, spectatorship, sexuality
and gender, and more in the work of such figures as Tzara, Stein, Cage,
Burroughs, Magritte, and others. We will follow Duchamp from his earliest
"found art" such as the infamous "Fountain"--a signed urinal; to his incarnation
as his female alter ego Rrose Selavy (Eros, c'est la vie); through his construction
of "The Large Glass" (otherwise known as "The Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even") and its accompanying explanatory notes by the artist;
and finally in the phenomenon of his final work which, because it cannot
be reproduced, can only be seen through a peephole in a door in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
4. Seminar: Queer Literary Traditions
For many writers, philosophers, and theorists, to confront the question of literary and cultural tradition is to engage a paradoxical object, one that is "inherited" through repeated scenes of its failed or thwarted transmission: writings lost or of equivocal provenance, texts reduced to fragments or adulterated in translation, epoch-making encounters that just barely escape taking place, historical contexts lost to posterity, tantalizing details left unrecorded by unobservant contemporaries, pedagogical relations thwarted by incompetent or too interested teachers or by dull or otherwise distracted students, and critical receptions of seminal texts unalterably shaped by charismatic misreadings. This course will examine the queer allure of such scenes, suggesting, among many other things, the possibility of understanding thwarted transmission as synonymous with the literary tradition as such. In imaginings of the thwarted transmission of literary and cultural knowledge, the course will examine how certain major philosophers, poets, novelists, and critics have understood the queerness of tradition. Writers will include some of the following: Plato, Sappho, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Wilde, Pater, James, Swinburne, Hopkins, Faulkner, Nabokov, Sedgwick, Bloom, de Man, Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze.
