Criticism and Freedom: Imagination as a Practice of Liberation

Catalog description

Criticism is fundamentally an act of imaginative freedom: the capacity to see more broadly than before, to experience ourselves, others, the world, literature, and the arts otherwise - to think otherwise, to live otherwise. This seminar traces how the philosophical, aesthetic, and political imagination sustains criticism as a practice of liberation - an endeavor that extends into writing, reading, and teaching as living arts of freedom. Readings include Kant, Holderlin, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty, Butler, Felski, Linda Zerilli, Hartmut Rosa, and others.