Limited to 5 students. This year's Delmas seminar takes the work of Walter Benjamin as a point of departure for an inquiry into the relationship between modernity and everyday life. Benjamin thought this relation could best be understood by looking at the ruins left behind by a previous moment of capitalist development- for him, Paris in the 19th century. This 'after life' opens the commodity to interpretation as 'the dream of the collective' and thus grounds the process of 'awakening' from the 'narcotic historicism' or capitalist modernity. Note application deadline is Monday, November 13th.
Topics vary according to instructor.
This seminar is required of all majors. Ms. Batur-VanderLippe, Mr. Godfrey. This course explores the transformations in social space and cultural identity that attended the emergence of modernity in the nineteenth century America. We chart the rise of the city, the public park, the asylum, the train, the factory the middleclass home, the culture industry, and the continental nation, as we explore the ways in which selected writers negotiated the ambivalent power of these new spaces of modern life and the new models of subjectivity and inferiority that took shape within them. Ms. Brawley, Ms. Graham.