ENG 5049 Spring 2019 Faulk

This course is offered parallel with the Winthrop King conference on the topic “Does ‘la lutte continue’? The Global Afterlives of May ’68,” hosted at FSU March 28-30, 2019. The two instructors are co-organizers of this event.

According to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the protagonists of May’68 student protests in Paris and a confirmed keynote speaker at our conference, “Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Berkeley, Rome, Prague, Rio, Mexico City, Warsaw were the centers of a revolt that spread across the world and inspired the hearts and dreams of an entire generation.” Protesters felt united by their opposition against the Vietnam War; more generally they were against totalitarian political regimes of any type, fossilized traditions, patriarchal authorities, racial prejudice and sexual discrimination.

The year 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of these May uprisings. While the orientation of our conference will focus primarily on the ramifications of this historical moment on contemporary society, the seminar is more interested in exploring the main ideas and intellectual influences that inspired student revolts throughout the Western hemisphere. We are especially interested in examining the correlation between aesthetic judgment and political action. Aesthetics since Kant has laid the foundation for the envisioning of a world different from reality, and in artistic expressions one can find freedom and harmony often lacking in other forms of human experience. Both have motivated many ‘68ers to revolutionary action.

Accordingly our study of 1968 includes foundational texts in Aesthetics by Kant and Schiller, and Hannah Arendt re-reading Kant, radical critiques of Aesthetic philosophy by the writers of the Frankfort School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse), as well as film and literature that represents the revolutionary spirit of the tumultuous year: Fernando Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces, which inaugurated the “Third Cinema” movement; William S. Burroughs’ new media manifesto, “The Electronic Revolution”; Allen Ginsberg’s visionary anti-Vietnam War poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”; Situationist cultural theory (by Guy Debord), fiction (by Michele Bernstein) and film, and collective statements from radical student groups.

While the focus of our discussions will be mostly on the philosophy, politics, literature, films, and other artistic events in the United States, Germany, and France, we plan to invite guests to lecture on the intellectual, cultural, and political contexts of other nations during this exciting historical period that experiences a revival not just due to its fiftieth anniversary, but also due to the sociopolitical and cultural climate of the world today.