04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
Enterprise Hall 174
Section Information for Spring 2019
This course explores concepts of personhood, concepts of thing-ness, and theories of the relationship between persons and things. How do we differentiate between persons and things? How do things structure the relationships between persons? What happens when people are treated as things? What happens when things take on the qualities of persons? How are we shaped by the things we buy, use, desire, hoard and discard? What kind of things are works of art? What kinds of meanings do things acquire--and how do they resist meaning--in literary works or outside them?
We start with an in-depth look at two crucial theorists of modernity, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and their still-provocative thinking on “persons,” “things,” and their interconnection. We look at ideas such as the commodity fetish and the fetish object. We linger in the realm of the uncanny, where the difference between persons and things blurs. We move on through philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, linguistics, psychoanalysis, to recent re-imaginations of “thingness” in theories that attempt to come to terms with a world overflowing with (man-made) stuff. We will use as case studies a few literary works, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, poetry by John Keats and others, essays on things such as thrift store clothes and trash, advertisements, and films.
View 2 Other Sections of this Course in this Semester »
Credits: 3
The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.