The development of a course for third-semester students on differing conceptions of art from prehistoric times through the present day.

The development of a course for third-semester students on differing conceptions of "art" from prehistoric times through the present day. Drawing from selected texts in philosophy and literature, as well as examples in music, film, architecture, performance, and design, the class on the question, What is art? examines whether art is fundamental to the human psyche or vital to the look of the world we live in. In the first of five sections, Origins, students consider the urge to produce art. They view Werner Herzog's film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which explores the earliest cave paintings though the lens of contemporary desires, and compare early fertility figures with contemporary performance art. This section concludes with essays on critical theory by Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. In the second section, Authenticity, students discuss essays by Walter Benjamin and Jonathon Keats while investigating the stylistic effects and legal ramifications of appropriation in the work of visual artists Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Shepard Fairey. Shakespeare's King Lear is paired with film adaptations by Andrew McCullough, Jean Luc-Goddard, and Akira Kurosawa as encouragement to consider how cultural differences are expressed in the act of dramatization. The third unit, Spirituality and the Transcendent, focuses on the ideas of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophers Kant, Burke, and Goethe, and the poetry and pictures of William Blake, Francisco Goya, and William Wordsworth. The fourth unit, Mimesis, explores the relationship between real life and representation in readings from Plato, Susan Sontag, and Jacques Lacan and portraits ranging from Roman busts to Leonardo, Picasso, and Arbus. Participants also read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The final unit, Commitment, explores the socio-political dimensions of art with selections from Diderot and Marx, as well as Tolstoy's treatise "What is Art?" and Sartre's "What is Literature?" Examples of political art include the paintings of Jacques Louis David, Russian revolutionary cinema, and two polemical novels, William Morris's News from Nowhere and Emile Zola's The Masterpiece. Arthur Danto's After the End of Art and Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art are used to open up a dialogue on artistic production and intention. The course concludes with an analysis of two films: Exit Through the Gift Shop, a study of the elusive artist Banksy, and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a documentary on the Chinese political dissident and experimental performance artist.

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To study a group of 20th century writers in French, German, Italian and English whose work embodies a skeptical, individual and adversary critical consciousness. These writers are self-consciously situated between, on the one hand, the claims of a dominant culture (which they characterize and describe) and, on the other, the need for a systematic methodology (which they approach, but finally resist). Writers to be studied: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Lionel Trilling, R. P. Blackmur, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Lucien Goldmann.

A five-week seminar for sixteen college and university teachers to study Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and its impact on technology, media, and history.

Walter Benjamin's career extended from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the second. In contrast to figures like Freud, Heidegger, or Foucault who enjoyed widespread recognition and influence during their lifetime, Benjamin's significance as a theorist and writer only came after his death. But like them, Benjamin may be characterized, in Foucault's words, as one of the "initiators of discursive practices," authors who "produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts." What is more, Benjamin's reputation has been singularly colored by a legendary 'afterlife.' Admittedly, the 'legend' of a writer should not supersede the interpretation of the works, but neither may it be ignored in evaluating their historical impact. It represents an indispensable index of cultural-political currents at a given moment.

No project description available

This project shows how the psychodynamics of French and British cultural imperialisms in Egypt (1798-1952) lured colonized Egyptians to seek power through empire rather than against it, to translate their cultures into empowered "equivalence" with those of their dominators and thus repress inequalities between their dominators and themselves. Egyptian intellectuals, I argue, first began to "love" and to translate their colonizers' literatures when those writings spoke to them in "loving" translation: in Arabic or native idiom. Drawn by Europe's self- Arabizations to Europeanize Arabic literature in turn, Egyptians attached themselves to European empires even as they imagined themselves to be overcoming colonial domination.

The equivalent of four fellowships a year for three years.

This proposal seeks funding from the NEH for the period July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2011 to support the program of ACLS/SSRC/NEH Fellowships in International and Area Studies. The ACLS has successfully administered this and predecessor programs since 1978. The program is integrated into the central ACLS fellowship competition, since multi-disciplinary research characterizes not only area studies but much work in the humanities in general; area studies scholarship benefits from evaluation in this larger context. Integration of the programs maximizes the number of NEH Fellows, who are supported both by grant funds and by ACLS endowment funds. The program offers 15 fellowships a year to post-doctoral scholars in all disciplines of the humanities working on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, East Europe, and the former Soviet Union.

To support a translation of Walter Benjamin's writings on language, perception,and image.