| 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | Mallinckrodt / 303 | Hazlett | No Final | 35 | 24 | 0 |
| Desc: | Special topic: art and negative emotions. The premise of this course is that engaging with art - looking at paintings and photographs, watching movies, reading novels, listening to music - sometimes makes us feel bad. Artworks can make us feel sad, anxious, upset, angry, or afraid; they can prompt grief, shame, guilt, confusion, and pity. This presents us with a puzzle: why do we voluntarily, and sometimes eagerly, choose to engage with artworks that, in this way, cause us to feel bad? In this course, we will study this question and some related questions in the philosophy of art. Our goal will be to familiarize ourselves with these questions and to study some artworks that make them salient, including works in a special exhibition on the topic of art and negative emotions, which will be on view in the Teaching Gallery at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in Spring 2024. Our aim will be to consider a wide range of media and forms of art, including narrative fiction - which has been the standard case when discussing the so-called "paradox of tragedy" - but also photography, painting, music, and non-fiction literature. The question of why we choose to engage with artworks that make us feel bad is related both to questions about particular artforms, such as concerns about the ways in which pictures and photographs can aestheticize suffering and injustice, and to general questions in the philosophy of art, such whether art is essentially political. |
|
|
| Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
| |
|