COML 6601

Erotics of Visuality

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

"The pleasure of the text," Roland Barthes writes, "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do."  What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies?  Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas?  In the context of recent cinema, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on sexuality and visual studies? Although we will read essays by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Lee Edelman, Slavoj Zizek, and other theorists whose work on visuality has been influential for a long time, we will focus on cinema of the past decade or so, including the work of such auteurs as Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Matthew Barney, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, Gaspar Noé, Gus Van Sant, and Wong Kar-wai.

When Offered Fall.

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