Critical Theory and the Historical Imagination

What is the past? What does it do? What's it for? In this course we'll look together at how people we don't usually think of as historians–poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, critical theorists, and others–have tried to understand the past, and tried to use the past to understand the present. We'll wander through various genres, historical periods, and ways of thinking, from Shakespearean drama and Dutch Golden Age painting to postmodernist fiction, personal essays, the graphic novel, and Chaos Theory. Authors (of various sorts) include James Baldwin, Marjane Satrapi, Akira Kurosawa, the Kinks, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Yi-Fu Tuan, Tom Stoppard, Seijun Suzuki, and of course you.