ARTHIST 401A: Soren Kierkegaard and the Visual Arts (ARTHIST 201A)

Course Description

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Danish philosopher and theologian, espoused the importance of the individual's relation to God, the need to forsake different forms of group-think ("the crowd is untruth"), and the necessity of overcoming despair as a means to finding one's own spirit or "infinitization." In dense but accessible prose, dedicating his books always to his readers (of whom he had almost none during his lifetime), he wrote beautiful and tormented texts psychoanalyzing himself as a first patient, a first agent, of the truth he saw for others. Reading famous Kierkegaard texts such as Fear and Trembling, The Seducer's Diary, The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, and The Point of View for My Work as an Author, we will consider the challenging and open question of the philosopher's relation to works of visual art. In our own moment of artistic norms and conventions, profound personal seeking is as shunned and forbidden as it was in Kierkegaard time. Considering art from then and now, each student will write on a work of art of their own choosing, exploring it in a Kierkegaardian fashion.