First-Year Research Seminar: The Art of Doing Nothing

Catalog description

What would it take to stop working? To refuse work? Give it up? To do something else, at odds with productive activity and labor, or nothing at all? And how might doing nothing, so to speak, introduce radically different senses of freedom? In this seminar, we’ll think about some of the ways that modern literature and film reflect on the art of doing nothing, frequently turning the city or its outskirts into a locus for personal and collective struggle, resistance, and transformation. Our aim will be to examine strategies for breaking free from the dominance of work, as illustrated by the so-called flâneur/flâneuse, but also by other antiwork figures like the slacker, idler, cruiser, fugitive, drifter, and street ambler, primarily but not exclusively within the urban topographies of New York, Paris, and London from the 19th century onward. We will pay special attention to the critical potentialities of unmanaged and wayward lives at the intersection of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. The course will introduce first-year students to critical methodologies in the fields of comparative literature, transnational modernisms, queer and feminist theory, and Black studies and enable them to undertake an array of research projects corresponding to their own academic interests or concentrations. We will read fiction, memoirs, and poetry by Baudelaire, Beckett, Boyer, Breton, Calle, Delany, Jacobs, Melville, Poe, and Woolf; theoretical work by Barthes, Benjamin, Federici, Hartman, and Weeks; and watch movies by Tsai and Varda. There may also be occasional musical interludes.