Subject: January Book of the Month
From: Wolfgang Schirmacher (W.Schirmacher@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Jan 04 2000 - 20:22:53 CST
Let’s start our readings on a light note with John Water’s SHOCK VALUE, “a
tasteful book about bad taste”. Watch out for the “intelligent calm”
(=Gelassenheit) in Water’s best work on the American grotesque!
January is WATERS month, and you are expected to enter at least one comment
by the end of the month (the online tutorial will open
mid-January). Please feel free to watch as many Waters movies as you can
stand. You are not supposed to become an expert on Waters but to treat his
accomplishments as an opportunity to get inspired. So find something in it
for your own creative work and remember your general attitude should be that
of a (younger) colleague, not a student.
Inspiration is only part of the process, but conceptualization is equally
important. That is the reason why I am also assigning this month the
following short texts from the CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Anthology:
Friedrich Hölderlin, Judgment and Being
The Oldest Program Towards a System of German Idealism
F.W.J.Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism
The challenge is to use German Idealism and its concept of aesthetic
judgment to give WATERS the theoretical (!) attention he certainly deserves.
John has recently published a volume of ‘still’ photographs capturing the
“divine” moments in his cinematographic work (book title DIRECTOR’S CUT)
which is extremely helpful for our purpose.
Please bear in mind: If the assigned readings are not helpful, go to the
philosophers’ website and check out their publication list to find something
you can relate to. Your (possible) thesis / dissertation project should
still be your subject and angle of perspective and should function as your
focus in the online tutorial and during your intensive seminars - even if
it is refined and / or changed by now.
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