Literary and Cultural Theory: The Human Ornament

This course explores the (aesthetic and material) conflation between persons and things, particularly between persons and ornaments, which in turn entails gender and racial implications. We bring the histories of the object, the ornament, and their Modernist incarnations to bear on a variety of critical discourses: the Frankfurt School, Marxism, psychoanalysis, object studies, queer and feminist theory, critical race theory, and animal and posthuman studies. We explore the entanglements between monsters, machines, and pretty things.