Corporeal Literacy

Course goals

This course aims to increase knowledge of and insight into the cultural and historical specificity of perception and cognition. The course trains skills in critical reading of media, art and performance objects.

After completing this course, the student will have:

• knowledge of and insight into current discourse of corporeal literacy, as well as into the strategic potential of the term;
• developed skills in critical reading of media, art and performance objects.
• developed skills in responding to theoretical texts

Content

Literacy often gets associated with words, with verbal language and books, but can also describe other reading skills, as, for example, in visual literacy. Corporeal literacy is a strategic term meant to make space for a further expansion of the notion of literacy to include our bodily engagement with what we find ourselves confronted with. New technological developments as well as increased insight in the performative, material, embodied, and enactive aspects of perception and cognition foreground the corporeal dimensions of how humans handle information and make sense of what they encounter. These developments require a reconsideration of our conceptions of (among others) perception, agency, and what it means to know, beyond the disembodied mind. Furthermore, our current situation in which technology plays an ever more prominent and active role in how things can be perceived and come to be known requires a rethinking the embodiment of cognition and intelligence beyond the human. 

This course explores the potential of new materialist, media archaeological, posthuman performative, enactive and embodied approaches for the analysis and interpretation of encounters with media and performances of different kinds. We will look at the corporeal dimensions of perception and cognition as culturally and historically specific phenomena. That is, we will look at perception and cognition as embodied and as co-constituted by culturally and historically specific practices and contexts. We will look at how perception and cognition are cultured, how this manifests itself, and how we can become aware of such cultural and historical specificity. We will also look at how increased awareness of this cultural and historical specificity contributes to ‘fleshing out’ capacities and activities that have traditionally been associated with the mind (like for example thinking, learning, understanding) and opens the possibility of new approaches to these activities.

Additional information

This course is for students in the RMA programmes KUEM, Musicology, Art History, Gender Studies, Religious Studies, NLC, CLS, MAPS and the EFMS programme. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself. Students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. Only this way participation can be granted.

Career orientation:
The course trains skills in critical reading, analysis of media, art and performance objects, and argumentative writing, which can be applied to a variety of professional fields (cultural institutions, academia, education, etc.).
Students also practice the skill of writing a proposal for an academic paper.