Imagine a collection of prized objects. What motivates a collector to acquire and display them? How do these objects allow us to understand the past as it defines our own heritage and that of others, what we choose to preserve or erase? These questions ground our study of the pleasures of collecting. A passion for things can be empowering, but it can also signal exploitation. What happens when the desire to possess extends to a person--when a person becomes the thing possessed? The passion to possess implies the power to dispossess, to take from others the property, privileges, and promises that were theirs. We will focus on three sites of power in which collections figure prominently: the court of Louis XIV at Versailles; the museums, department stores, and world's fairs of 19th-century Paris; and the world of objects in 20th-century poetry and photographs. The class will examine objects that speak to the relations between men and women; kings and subjects; humans and nature; ideas of freedom and efforts to suppress it. Authors and artists include Perrault, Lafayette, Duras, Baudelaire, Zola, Ponge, Vuillard, Caillebotte, Cartier-Bresson, and others. Prereq: In-Perspective or Fr 308.
Course Attributes: BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H
