Humanities 160

Media Aesthetics Fall 2019

PROF. LAWRENCE ROTHFIELD | OFFICE HOURS: TUESDAYS 3:30-4:30 (OR BY APPOINTMENT),

ROSENWALD 428, (773) 702-5676 | LARY@UCHICAGO.EDU | PRONOUNS: HE/HIM/HIS

SECTION 2 TTH 9:30-10:50, PICK 319

SECTION 6, TTH 2-3:20, COBB 403
WRITING INTERN: DAVID WOMBLE | EMAIL: DAW23@UCHICAGO.EDU (OFFICE HOURS BY
APPOINTMENT) | PRONOUNS: HE/HIM/HIS

Media Aesthetics introduces students to the humanities by investigating how media work and
how we aesthetically perceive them. We treat "aesthetics" as the study of sensory perception,
of value, and of stylistic and formal properties of artistic products. We understand "medium"
along a spectrum of meanings that range (in Aristotle's terms) from the "material cause" of art
(stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words for poetry) to the "instrumental cause" (the
apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast media, the Internet). In Fall Quarter we
focus on visual media, and pose a number of questions about images drawn from a range of
historical periods: what are the different forms of copying and imitation? Is it possible to
ascertain how seemingly “natural” and/ or “mechanical” forms of representation are not as
objective as they seem to be? Is representation a replication of reality or is reality constituted
through representation? How is our sense of our own reality affected by our relationship to
images? What are the political stakes of representation?

Course Texts (at the Seminary Coop)

Plato, Republic, trans/ed. Reeve, ISBN 0872207366
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye*
All other reading, images, and videos available on or via Canvas, or on website links given
below in the syllabus.

Required Lecture & Screenings:

Please note that there is one required lecture and two screenings.
Film Screenings:
Friday, October 11th at 3PM// Kiarostami, Close Up//Runtime 100 minutes
Friday, November 8th at 3PM// Hitchock, Vertigo //Runtime 130 minutesDoc Films, Ida Noyes
Hall, 1212 E 59thSt Required Distinguished Faculty Lecture Wednesday, November 6th,5PM-
6PM// Professor Allyson Field//Location TBD

COURSE BREAKDOWN

Attendance & Participation: 15%

Short Assignments: 20%
Paper One: 20%
Paper Two: 20%
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Final Project 25%

Class Participation
Participation requires being on time when your colleagues expect you, well prepared to engage
in classroom conversation.
+ Don’t worry if you are occasionally bewildered by our reading. Intelligent bewilderment is
where significant intellectual work most often begins.
+ If you are worried about speaking in class, rest assured that this is very common. Come and
talk to me, and we will do our best to work something out.

The classroom is a space for thinking generously and ambitiously with others. All students are
expected to be courteous, respectful, and committed to intellectual practice. This means
arriving on time, silencing and putting away PEDs, and offering your views. It should go
without saying that texting, checking Facebook, and the like is prohibited during class. If
you are caught doing so, you will be asked to leave, and your participation grade will be
reduced significantly.

Short Assignments
I will assign a few short assignments to be completed in conjunction with your reading.
Assignments may include brief responses to questions, close reading of a sentence or image,
outlining an argument, and so on. These assignments must be posted to the discussion board on
the Canvas site before class.

Writing Seminar Participation

Your writing instructor will send you instructions for meetings throughout the course of the
quarter. You participation in these meetings is mandatory for the course (and for
graduation from the College).

Essays
You will write 3 essays in the course. Prompts for these will be distributed in advance. Essays
should be emailed to me and your writing instructor. All essays must be emailed to both
Larry and David by 5 P.M. (CST) on their due dates.

Formatting guidelines will be included on every prompt. The key is that all essays must be in
Word, not PDF or Pages.

All papers should include a bibliography, in a citation format of your choice. Academic
citation isn’t always intuitive, so if you have questions, please ask. Remember, sloppy citation
practices can result in diminished marks—or, worse still, accusations of plagiarism. Plagiarism
is a serious offense that may lead to disciplinary action by the University up to and including
suspension or even expulsion. No one wants that. To avoid plagiarism, follow the guide
appended to this syllabus. If you are unsure if you should cite something or not, you probably
should. If you have any questions about this, please contact me or your writing instructor.

Accessibility
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I am committed to ensuring that all students can fully participate in class. If you have a
documented disability and require accommodation for this course, please provide me with a
copy of your Accommodation Determination Letter (provided to you by the Student Disability
Service office) so that we can begin discussing how you can best thrive through this course. If
your disability is not registered but you have, or believe you may have, a disability, contact the
office at 773-702- 6000/TTY 773-795-1186 or disabilities@uchicago.edu, or visit the website
at disabilities.uchicago.edu. If you need help navigating these services, please let me know.

Course Schedule
Week 1 Introduction: Seeing Clearly, Seeing the Light, Seeing in the Dark
Oct 1 Media? Aesthetics?
• What do we mean when we say "media"? What is a medium of
perception/communication/art? What mediates/acts as
intermediary/provides the raw material/provides the mode of
expression (the code or form or genre) that the maker of
meanings works with? How is the medium of an artwork (or of
any expression/communication) distinguishable from the
content/message communicated? What does McCluhan's dictum
"The medium is the message" mean, and is he right?
• What do we mean by "aesthetics"?
• Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas—Image

Oct 3 Meta-pictures
Writing Seminars scheduling to be done in class
Foucault, “Las Meninas”
Assignment:
Read the Foucault carefully. (Warning: It is deceptively simple at the beginning,
but gets hard. There is going to be a lot about the Foucault that you may not
understand – don’t worry, it’s okay not to understand everything so long as you
try to understand as much as you can.) Your assignment is threefold:
a) find the sentence that you think is the most important, and to post it to
Canvas in the discussion section at least one hour before class. You may be
asked in class to explain why you picked this sentence, so pick carefully and
come prepared to do that.
b) look at the picture again and find something in it that you believe Foucault
left out of his interpretation entirely or didn't address to your satisfaction. Come
to class ready to tell us what that is when called upon.

Week 2 Images as Imitation/Copy: Ethical Dangers and Aesthetic

Possibilities
Oct 8 Plato, Republic, from Book 7, pp. 208-214, the allegory of the cave

Oct 10 Plato, Republic: end of book 2 on bad examples offered by poets who
need to be censored (p. 56-end); book 3 through pg. 86; all of book 10
(297-326)
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Motion Picture Production Code

Botticelli, Primavera
Avoiding plagiarism (see end of syllabus)
Paper assignment #1 handed out

Friday Oct. 11, 3-5 pm Screening: Kiarostami, Close Up, noon

Week 3 Defending Imitation, Examining Medium

Oct 15 Aristotle, Poetics: chs.1-4, 6-10, 11, 13-15, and 23-26
Jean-Antoine Gros, Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau

Oct 17 Close Up

Oct 20 Essay 1 due by 5 pm by email to both lary@uchicago.edu and

daw23@uchicago.edu

Week 4 Painting versus Photography: Does it Make Any Difference?

Oct 22 Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”

comparating paintings and photographs
A:
Jeff Wall, Picture For Women
Eduard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergèr
B (in powerpoint on execution of Maximilian):
Manet, Execution of Maximilian
photos related to execution

Oct 25 Portraits and Identity

Coco Fusco, "Only Skin Deep"
Angelica Dass, "Humanae Project"
Amy Sherald, oil portraits

Week 5 Aura in a World of Copies

Oct 29 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility”: focus on the concept of aura
Icons

Oct 31 Benjamin, “Work of Art”: focus on exhibition versus cult value

Riefenstahl, 1934 Nuremberg rally from Triumph of the Will
Busby Berkeley, “Beautiful Girls”
Vertov, clips from Man with a Movie Camera

Week 6 Authenticity and Subjectivity/Flatness

Nov 5 van Gogh, “Peasant Shoes”: important: look slowly at van Gogh’s
painting and take notes before reading Heidegger
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Heidegger, Origin Of The Work Of Art: read 158 ("How shall we

discover..." through bottom of 169
Warhol images

Nov 6 LECTURE: Allyson Field on early cinema, 5:00-6:00pm Kent 107

Nov 7 Losing Perspective: Picturesque Absorption, Immersion

The Claude Glass: https://vimeo.com/user51144340/claudeglass
Diderot from the Salon of 1763
Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountain
Ralph Blakelock, selected images (powerpoint)
Edison train films:
https://archive.org/details/PanoramicViewOfTheGoldenGate1902
http://www.loc.gov/item/00694216/

Screening: Hitchcock, Vertigo, Friday, Nov. 9, 3-5:30pm, at Doc Films

Week 7 Vertigo
Nov 12 Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo

Nov 14 Hitchcock, Vertigo

Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Nov 15 Essay 2 due by 5 pm

Week 8 Self-images
Nov 19 Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Nov 21 Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Dick and Jane images

Week 9
Nov 26 Abstraction, Expression
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”
Monet, Water Lilies
Abstractions at Art Institute:
Claude Monet, Irises
Jackson Pollock, Greyed Rainbow [Lavender Mist
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape
Rothkos
Possible trip to the Art Institute or Smart Museum

Nov 28 *photoshopping exercise: in groups, start with an image and substitute

three aspects or elements; justify your choices

Week 10
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Dec 3 Wrap-up
Marshall, School of Beauty

Dec 11 Essay #3 due by 5 pm