This course is concerned with museums and exhibition spaces and their embeddedness in narrative. Museums serve as repositories of knowledge, of cultural memory, and as opportunities for national display. They can reproduce absent worlds and provide an experiential space for unfamiliar realities. We will focus on how collections, in their selection and arrangement of material, create specific narratives about the objects exhibited. A second focus will be on fictional narratives and films and the ways they make use of the museum to negotiate questions of culture and identity, authenticity and hyperreality as well as knowledge production. And lastly we will reflect on the parallels of museum spaces and textual spaces (the text as an archive of knowledge etc.). Please buy and read the following texts: Bruce Chatwin, Utz (1988) Julian Barnes, England, England (1988) A Reader with additional material will be available at the beginning of the semester. N.B.: This is one of three classes that include an excursion to London. The excursion will take place in the second half of February. An obligatory meeting for all involved students will take place on 26 October 2010, 6.00pm, DOR 24, 1.501. Die Veranstaltung beginnt in der 2. Semesterwoche. |
