An interdisciplinary, cross-century and/or comparative examination of topics in literary and cultural studies. Materials relating directly to French Studies will normally constitute at least 25% of all class materials.

In this seminar, we’ll read and dissect important works that deal with touch from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives. If touch, for Aristotle, is the base, most material sense, it is also what allows a thinking of sense to be possible at all. A thinking of touch pervades western philosophy, which Jacques Derrida took to task precisely for its “haptocentrism”. In the first few weeks of the seminar, we’ll work through some of the philosophical complexities linked to touch, paying particular attention to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. We’ll then turn to more recent work on touching art, from cave painting to medieval icons, from oil painting to modernist sculpture. We’ll also put pressure on the “phenomenological” turn in Film Theory and especially the influential model of “haptic visuality” (as Laura U. Marks reads Gilles Deleuze). In the second half of the course, we’ll think about touch more expansively in relation to: queerness and the archive (Roland Barthes and Carolyn Dinshaw); affect and reading; Didier Anzieu’s “skin-ego”; ethics (Emmanuel Levinas’ caress); erotics and intimacy; and, finally, the digital. Although many of the readings are originally in French, English translations will also be made available, and discussion will be in English. Seminar members will work towards a research paper in which they reread a cultural artefact from a theoretical perspective informed by the figure of touch.

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