08 January 2009
that philosophy, film, lit course in full!
Here is the outline for my 'Philosophy, Film & Literature' course. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Due to lack of time, I could only ethically include things I've seen recently, but I will watch everything that everyone suggested and make changes if, erm, I ever get to teach this again. I also forgot in the initial request to mention that there has to be a bit of literature for every week, so I kind of just shoved that in there with some help from Owen and Michael. This course has the advantage of being the kind of course I would take, though how generalisable that will turn out to be is - as yet - unclear. We shall...erm....see!
1. Perception:
Film: Samuel Beckett’s Film
Literature: Kafka’s ‘The Cares of a Family Man’
Philosophy: George Berkeley on perception (extracts)
2. Movement:
Film: Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera
Literature: Ilya Ehrenburg’s Life of the Automobile (extracts)
Philosophy: Vertov’s We
3.Culture:
Film: Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451
Literature: George Orwell’s 1984 (extracts)
Philosophy: Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is The Massage (extracts)
4. Reality:
Film: Peter Weir’s The Truman Show
Literature: Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint (extracts)
Philosophy: Nietzsche ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (extracts)
5.Time & Memory:
Film: Marker’s La Jetee
Literature: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (extracts)
Philosophy: Henri Bergson (extracts)
6. Love:
Film: Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death
Literature: Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Philosophy: Martha Nussbaum Love’s Knowledge (extracts)
7. Chance:
Film: Fresnadillo’s Intacto
Literature: Raymond Carver Short Cuts (extracts)
Philosophy: Ian Hacking The Taming of Chance (extracts)
8.Morality:
Film: Carol Read’s The Third Man
Literature: William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Philosophy: Alain Badiou’s Ethics (extracts)
9. Identity:
Film: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
Literature: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (extracts)
Philosophy: Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’
10. Politics:
Film: Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers
Literature: Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Measures Taken’ (extracts)
Philosophy: Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (extracts)
11. Mortality:
Film: Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Literature: Edgar Allen Poe (extracts)
Philosophy: Steven Shaviro’s ‘Capitalist Monsters’
