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Comrades might remember my blog post about dropping a documentary class at Columbia. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/dropping-a-film-class-at-columbia-university/ Basically I expected some kind of survey class about the development of the genre but was instead force-fed the professor's "critical theory" approach which revolved around the question whether such films convey reality or not. Her approach was a mixture of Derrida and Social Text post-Marxism, very much not to my taste. It turns out that the film department at Columbia is fairly ripe with this stuff, based on an article in today's NYT magazine: November 26, 2010 The Professor of Micropopularity By CARLO ROTELLA ON A MONDAY evening in September, James Schamus and a dozen students in his graduate seminar in film theory at Columbia University were discussing the dialogues of Plato. Each participant who spoke called on the next speaker, and Schamus gave the group plenty of leeway to tussle with the text, but every once in a while he raised his hand and intervened to guide the conversation. The course was called Seeing Narrative, and the discussion centered on Plato’s skepticism about the ability of any visible thing to represent ideal truth — a skepticism that, say, a bunch of beautiful images strung together in a movie could communicate the perfect, invisible idea of Beauty. Schamus, in bow tie and jacket, his mobile face alight with intentness, said: “In Plato, the philosopher’s job is to love knowledge, logos, but it’s always corporealized, and the body fools your senses, your perceptions. The soul is invisible and doesn’t change, and it wants to connect to other such invisible, unchanging things” — including Truth and Beauty in their ideal forms — “but it’s trapped in a body that’s always taking it to visible things that are never the same.” full: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28Schamus-t.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
