Seeing Narrative

An advanced film theory "workshop" in which we shall avoid reading film theory in favor of a selection of other texts, taken mainly from the domains of art history, philosophy, and literature. Our central question will be: What can we, who have grown up in the age of cinema and digital media, learn from discourses about vision and its relation to narrative that pre-date the cinema, or that consider the cinema only marginally? In this course, we shall begin to approach some of the major topics of contemporary film theory -- narrativity, subject-construction, the relation of words to images -- through the lens of texts that have remained largely outside the network of citations and references we normally associate with the work of professional media theory. We might begin the groundwork for an "opening up" or critique of some of the blind spots of current theory; at the very least, we shall be reading works that challenge our usual ways of theorizing.