The seminar and residency will explore the work of the most influential psychoanalyst writing in English today, Christopher Bollas, who will be scholar-in-residence at the Townsend Center in the first week of November 2016. Bollas is widely known for his pioneering, polymathic, and maverick investigations of unconscious perception of objects and the object world, including human beings—work that has been highly suggestive for many domains of the humanities and social sciences—and more recently for his exploration of fractured unconsciousness (anxiety, hysteria, breakdown, and schizophrenia). Prior to Bollas’s visit, we will discuss his published works (including The Freudian Moment, The Shadow of the Object, Being a Character, and When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia) as well as forthcoming and in-progress work that he will provide. Students will present their own projects to the group, and will develop questions to be discussed in seminars with Bollas himself and for one-on-one meetings with him during his residency.
Three seminar sessions will be convened by Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art) and will meet on three Wednesdays (September 21 and October 5 and 18) from 5:15 – 7 pm,... [show more]
Townsend Center "Book Chat" series : A General Theory of Visual Culture
Wednesday, Feb 19, 2014 | 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
Professor of History of Art Whitney Davis’ teaching and research interests include prehistoric and archaic arts; worldwide rock art; neoclassicism in Western art since the later Middle Ages; the development of professional art; art theory in visual-cultural studies; modern art history; the history and theory of sexuality; queer theory; world art studies; and environmental, evolutionary, and cognitive approaches to the global history of visual culture. His latest publication, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2011) examines the question: What is cultural about vision—or visual about culture?
Expansive in scope, this book draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual cultur... [show more]
The seminar and residency will explore the work of the most influential psychoanalyst writing in English today, Christopher Bollas, who will be scholar-in-residence at the Townsend Center in the first week of November 2016. Bollas is widely known for his pioneering, polymathic, and maverick investigations of unconscious perception of objects and the object world, including human beings—work that has been highly suggestive for many domains of the humanities and social sciences—and more recently for his exploration of fractured unconsciousness (anxiety, hysteria, breakdown, and schizophrenia). Prior to Bollas’s visit, we will discuss his published works (including The Freudian Moment, The Shadow of the Object, Being a Character, and When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia) as well as forthcoming and in-progress work that he will provide. Students will present their own projects to the group, and will develop questions to be discussed in seminars with Bollas himself and for one-on-one meetings with him during his residency. Three seminar sessions will be convened by Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art) and will meet on three Wednesdays (September 21 and October 5 and 18) from 5:15 – 7 pm,... [show more]
