Literature, Art and Environment

Catalog description

This course examines how philosophical, architectural, filmic, and literary practices shape our understanding of place and space, engaging with theories of mapping, spatiality, and the built environment. Does dwelling on this earth imply building? Is thinking itself an architectural act? What would it mean to undo this 'will to architecture'? What is the relation of the act to the environment? What does the situation of 'things and locations' mean for the possibilities of politics and thought? We will examine poetic and philosophical dimensions of place and site; modernity, nihilism, and its critique; belonging, the uncanny, and the stranger; utopia, dystopia, and the global built environment through readings, films, and artistic practices from figures and groups including Archigram, Bachelard, Badiou, Massimo Cacciari, Derrida, Heidegger, Isozaki Arata, Jameson, Karatani, Kiarostami, Henri Lefebvre, WG Sebald, Wallace Stevens, Superstudio, Manfredo Tafuri, Tarkovsky, Raymond Williams, and more.