Lecture (LEC)

• Above class open to graduates only
• Topic: The Modern Nude - Objectification, Critique, Affect

This seminar will investigate historically and art-theoretically the depiction of undressed human bodies in modernist art, while also extending the narrative back to the eighteenth century (when many of the discursive formations that still inform our view of the nude took shape) and forward to postmodern and contemporary art. Manet's work of the 1860s will be seen as a pivotal moment in the rise of the modernist nude. Other topics will include depictions of the nude in painting and sculpture from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism; sexuality in Dada and Surrealism; the photographic nude; and the nude in the twentieth-century "low-brow" or popular art such as calendar pin-ups, illustration and cartooning manuals, and body-culture magazines. Many of the class readings will come from feminist and queer-studies approaches, juxtaposing critiques of sexual objectification with "reparative readings" drawing on affect theory and postcritique, as proposed by writers such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Toril Moi.