| The
Self-Portrait (Spring
2005)
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This course fulfills Category IV of the General Education Requirement. Faculty:
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Course Description: Who am I? What makes the creative act of representing the self different from representing another? Can the essential self be depicted authentically? Or is what is essential precisely that which can never be represented? Does the act of self-representation change the subject? Is a picture worth a thousand words, or can words provide more scope for self-representation? These are questions at the heart of humanistic studies and questions that every university student wrestles with in some form. "The Self-Portrait" will consider these questions from literary and visual perspectives, and will track these issues from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The class will be taught by two professors, and will include both lectures and discussion sections. Students will be exposed to a wide range of self-portraits in literature, the fine arts, and film. Within this framework, we will emphasize the literary and visual examples of Cellini, Goethe, and the Surrealists, and will visit the Dalí exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to analytical assignments and a final exam, students will prepare their own self-portraits during the semester in the medium of their choice, and our course will culminate in an exhibition of their work. Among the central questions we will address are: 1. Staging Authenticity: The various inventions that take place in any depiction of the self, raising the question of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. 2. The Trauma of the Self: The ways in which trauma both deforms and generates notions of the self 3. The Ideology of the Self: The sometimes competing social and political claims on the representation of the self. 4. Surrogates of the Self: The ways in which objects and/or symbols can stand in for the self—sometimes violating the integrity of the self, sometimes manipulating it playfully. |