Description
Aesthetics, in the classical Greek sense, describes the means by which a thing is knowable to the senses; in short, to study aesthetics is to study how we gain knowledge of the world through our physical interaction with the things that surround us. This course will establish a general model of contemporary aesthetics (stressing aesthetics’ interconnections with social, political, and economic life), through late-twentieth and twenty-first century theory, along with numerous case studies drawn from cinema, art and architecture from the late-capitalist period through to the present day. Of central importance is how contemporary aesthetic discourse grapples with the rapid development of new technologies, the rise of global finance capital, and the colonial legacies of the United States and Europe, providing students with practical and historically grounded methods with which to assess and intervene in contemporary aesthetic discourse. Through the course we will explore how direct and oft