ARTHIST 212: Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds (ARTHIST 412, COMPLIT 212A, COMPLIT 312A, ILAC 212A, ILAC 312A)

Course Description

Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.