Critical Theory and the Historical Imagination

What's the past? What does it do? What's it for? What's it ever done for us? In this course we'll look together at how people we don't usually think of as historians–filmmakers, poets, playwrights, musicians, critical theorists, and others–try to understand the past, and try to use the past to understand the present. We'll wander through various genres, historical periods, and ways of thinking, from French movies and Dutch Golden Age painting to postmodernist fiction, graphic novels, Shakespearean drama, personal essays, and Chaos Theory. In addition to textual-analytical argument, major assessments will offer creative/analytical and personal-reflective options. 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.