On Being Bored

Catalog description

This course will explore how and why certain texts and films represent states of non-productivity or non-desire. Beginning with writings from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, we will move into contemporary theoretical and aesthetic reflections on the links between art and worklessness: narratives with neither progress nor plot, characters that resist characterization, as well as poems and films that resist emphatic assertion and revelation. Enrollment limited to 20.