Teacher: prof. Michael Shapiro

Reading, Discussion, Viewing Schedule:

Session 1 (October 1) Readings: Jacques Ranciere, “Fictions of Time” and Shapiro, “Punctuations Introduction.”

Session 2 (October 8) Readings: Kafka, “The Burrow,” Shapiro, “The Politics of Fear,” Kouba, “Perspective of the Outside” (in Kouba and Pivoda eds. Franz Kafka: Minority Report).

Session 3 (October 15) Shapiro, “Politicizing Ulysses,” Auerbach, “Odysseus’s Scar” (from Mimesis). Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk.”

Session 4 (October 22) chapters by Matan, Beiken and Brady and Hughes in Biderman and Lewit, Mediamorphosis plus film clips TBA

Session 5 (October 29) Shapiro, “Urban Punctuations” and “Streets” plus film footage from Ruttman’s Berlin Symphony of a Great City and Simonsson and Nilsson’s Sound of Noise

Session 6 (November 5) Shapiro, “How Popular Culture Thinks the Political” plus film footage from Spike Lee’s He Got Game and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Batlle of Algiers

Session 7 (November 12) Shapiro, “Architectural Punctuations” plus film footage from Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar

Session 8 (November 19) Shapiro, “Image Punctuations,” plus footage from Antonioni’s The Passenger

Session 9 (November 26) Peter Handke’s novel Slow Homecoming (recommended Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance), parts of Shapiro “Holocaust Punctuations” and Chapter 5 “The Aesthetics of Disintegration” in Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics.

Session 10 (December 3) Imre Kertesz’s novel Fatelessness and more of Shapiro, “Holocaust Punctuations’

Session 11 (December 10) W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the rest of Shapiro, “Holocaust Punctuations”

Session 12 (December 17) back to Kafka: readings from Metamorphosis and Minority Report and student-selected stories

Texts needed for the sessions (all others will be scanned and made available):

Kouba and Pivoda eds. Franz Kafka: Minority Report

Biderman and Lewit eds. Mediamorphosis

Handke, Slow Homecoming

Kertesz, Fatelessness

Sebald, Austerlitz

All of Kafka’s stories are available in English for free downloading at:

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/olli/class-materials/Franz_Kafka.pdf