Phenomenology and the Moving Image

This graduate seminar will focus on contemporary research on cinema, television, and new media, and related fields and particularly on phenomenology and the moving image. What experiences can moving images offer? How do humans encounter visual and auditory images? What happens to objects that are mediated through moving images? Can moving-image apparatuses be thought of as an embodied consciousness or non-human subjectivity? Whereas psychoanalysis often centers upon what remains outside our conscious thoughts and brain research deals with the biological structures that underlie our conscious experiences, this seminar will focus on philosophical attempts to give accounts of consciousness, of what it means for us or others to be in the world. In the seminar, we will discuss works that relate to the phenomenological movement (such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Levinas, and Sartre) and their development within film theory and cultural studies.