Media and Modernity

Explores the critical transformation in the relationship between interior and exterior space in modern architecture, which is most evident in domestic space. Domestic space ceases to be simply bounded space in opposition to the outside, whether physical or social. An analysis of modern houses is used as a frame to register contemporary displacements of the relationship between public and private space, instigated by the emerging reality of the technologies of communicaton, including newspaper, telephone, radio, film, and television.

This course covers various topics related to the history and theory of architecture.

Introduces beginning graduate students to the central problems and principal literature of the history of science from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Course is organized around several different methodological approaches, and readings include important works by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by historians of science.

The seminar is concerned with the work of a single European or American photographer or with a significant movement in the 20th century.

The study of the arts at the intersection of the disciplines.

A study in the major texts in criticism and theory. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, Derrida, and Foucault, among others. Topics include mimesis, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and new historicism.

A study of the role of culture in literary practice and theory. Topics include postmodernism, post-colonialism, feminism, performance theory, queer theory, and popular cultures, among others.

A research seminar in selected areas of aesthetics, art criticism, and architectural theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries on the notion of representation in art and architecture. This seminar is given to students in the doctoral program at the School of Architecture and to doctoral candidates in other departments.

Chance and contingency were long thought to lie outside the realm of knowledge. Then there arose new means for measuring probabilities of the most varied kinds. This seminar will explore the conditions and occurrence of that shift, as well as its consequences, as they are reflected in a few literary and philosophical works.