Mar 29, 2024  
Catalogue 2013-2014 
    
Catalogue 2013-2014 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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PHIL 260 - Philosophy and the Arts: Censorship in the Arts

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Acts of artistic censorship-social, religious, and political-are based on certain truth claims and on reactions to offending rival truth claims made by the arts. This includes issues about what are proper and improper forms of representation, what is representable and unrepresentable. Art is not the only target of censorship but is a privileged key because it is associated with three areas of offence-obscenity, blasphemy, and sedition. Censorship not only plays an inhibitive, restricted role but less appreciated, plays a productive role in the very formation of artworks. We shall explore a sense of truth in these discussions that is creative, revisionary, and dissentual and make use of theoretical writings by Plato, Rousseau, Mill, and Heidegger. We focus on five momentous cases of censorship: James Joyce’s Ulysees, Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Anselm Kiefer’s painting about the German past, Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, and the paintings and installations of Ai Wei Wei. Mr. Murray.

Two 75-minute periods.



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