Sites

This class extends the “spatial turn” of critical theory, scrutinizing uses of place and site as they relate to questions of identity and memory. Through close readings of texts culled from a broad range of disciplines (Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Architecture and Planning, Geography and Sociology), Sites explores the origins, forms, and uses of situated SPACE – in pictures, buildings, cities, landscapes and monuments. The course is framed – through reading presentations and discussions, field trips and written assignments – by the following questions: How do (gendered) bodies develop in/through space? What is the relationship between lived space, representational space and virtuality? By what set of spatial practices are we “positioned” culturally? Where and when do meaning, memory and place meet? Sites aims to provide specific analytic and critical tools for deciphering the spatial operations that are embedded within modes of cultural reproduction.

Selected Readings:

• Foucault, Michel. “Preface” and “Las Meninas”. The Order of Things; an
Archaeology of the Human Sciences. NewYork: Vintage Books, 1970.

• Grosz, Elizabeth. “Space, Time, and Bodies.” Space, Time, and
Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995. 85‐101.

• Leach, William. “Chapter 3: Interiors.” Land of Desire: Merchants,
Power and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: First
Vintage Books, 1994.

• Weizman, Eyal. “The Politics of Verticality: The West Bank as a
Architectural Construction”. Territories: Islands, Camps and Other
States of Utopia (Exhibition Catalog). Berlin: KW – Institute for
Contemporary Art, 2003.

• Young, James E. “Memory, Counter‐memory, and the End of the
Monument Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.” At Memory’s Edge. After‐Images of
the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000.