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Apr 18, 2024
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ENGL059 JT - Ovidian FiguresWhen Offered: Fall 2020.
Instructor(s): C. Rosenfeld
Credit: 1
Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins with the poet’s “intention” “to tell of bodies changed/ to different forms.” This course takes up that poem’s iterative, almost compulsive, attempt to capture the very moment at which one “body” ceases to be itself by transforming into something else. Tracing Ovid’s narrative scenes, including the myths of Apollo and Daphne, Echo and Narcissus, Actaeon, Philomela, and Pygmalion (to name a few) across centuries of retelling, refashioning, and reimagining, we will ask: How does one body, one constellation of matter, assume another shape? What is the relation of the human body to the plants and animals and minerals that it can become? How might the design concept of “affordance” encourage us to rethink the capacities of form? Most importantly, we will attempt to answer these questions through two distinct, historically competitive, but mutually generative modalities of inquiry: the verbal and the visual. Co-taught by a literary critic who specializes in poetry and poetic theory and a painter who specializes in figure drawing, course readings and assignments will move across these fields, requiring students to both analyze and create, write and draw, describe and make. Possible topics include: the temporalities of verbal and visual arts; ekphrasis (or the verbal depiction of the visual arts); enargeia (or the “vivid” style of language); the blazon (or the piecemeal depiction of the human body); human and post-human; psychoanalytic and feminist theory; history and philosophy of science; theories of form; bodily violence and the aesthetic; the fragmented body; abstraction as a strategy for defying categorization; perversion and developing a moral discourse on perception.
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1
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