Marking Place: Case Studies in Modern and Contemporary Art, Architecture, Performance, and Design

Marking Place: Case Studies in Modern and Contemporary Art, Architecture, Performance, and Design is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies course taught by Karen Koehler.

This course requires prerequisites. This course is only open to students in Division II and Division III.

Course Description
This proseminar will be an opportunity for students to develop an advanced research project on any artist, writer, designer, picture, text, building, monument, or site from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries--instances when and where art, fashion, literature, locale, and life were fused. We will explore traditional forms of texts, paintings, performances, photographs, as well as domestic and/or metropolitan spaces. We will consider new media and works that blur boundaries, or question the very edges of any definition of place. Anyone from Claude Monet to Mona Hatoum, from Walter Benjamin to Lewis Hyde, from Loie Fuller to the Tiller Girls, from Emile Zola to Pascal Mercier might be examined; anywhere from Bloomsbury to Greenwich Village, from Saigon to Soweto, from Chandigarh to Ground Zero could be the focus of a student project. How are spaces (both intimate or public) marked by texts? How does space progress a narrative? When is a house an (auto)biography? Can a city define a life? Is locale an actor in a transnational world? Critical theories, essays, novels, and specific sites, images, objects, films, and structures will be read. Open to Division III and advanced Division II students only.