CRITICAL & VISUAL STUDIES : Graduation/Convocation

Our Program of Study: Revised Curriculum Beginning Fall 2014!

Our Program of Study: Curriculum

Beginning Fall 2014

Pratt Institute Admissions http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/

Critical and Visual Studies is a Bachelor of Arts program for curious and imaginative students who want to pursue uniquely individualized studies in the liberal arts and sciences while immersed in Pratt’s environment of creative openness and intellectual experimentation.

Anchored in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, our program features an innovative curriculum that provides a broad foundation in the classic and contemporary works of the social sciences, philosophy, history, critical theory, and visual studies. Students choose from a generous selection of electives and concentrations from within the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and across the Institute in architecture, art history, art and design, and planning. In the third and Senior years, students enjoy a variety of electives while focusing on their concentrations, Minors, and Senior Thesis projects.

At the core of the program is the understanding that the integration of theory, method, and experience is crucial to learning and this brings vitality, creativity, and practical application to intellectual practice. Our students and faculty are interested in every aspect of social life—from street art to political systems, from international media to the global economy. Critical and Visual Studies provides an unique interdisciplinary framework within which our students explore the social, political, and artistic meanings of cultural and aesthetic production.

First Level: The first two years of the curriculum will give our students a broad and solid foundation in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as allowing you to begin exploring your own individual interests.

Semester I
The first semester immerses our students into the foundations of the Liberal Arts: critical analysis, history, philosophy, science, and literature. Students share a common experience in the first semester that will establish a unique basis for your studies:

CST.100 First Year Seminar - 3.0 credits
CH.300 World History I - 3.0 credits
PHIL.208 or PHIL.209 History of Philosophy - 3.0 credits
ENGL.101 Introduction to Literary and Critical Studies I - 3.0 credits
MSCI.210 Science and Society - 3.0 credits
CST.190 Beyond Google I: Basic Information Literacy - 1.0 credit
Total Credits 16.0

Semester II
Semester Two completes the introduction to history, critical studies, literature and writing. It allows students the flexibility to choose electives from across the department, the school, and the institute. To ensure a distribution of elective credits, in semesters 2, 3, and 4 students may take no more than 6 non-required credits in any one disciplinary field of Social Science, History, Philosophy, and, Math and Science and no more than 15 credits from any single division at Pratt (i.e. SLAS, Art & Design, and Architecture).

ENGL.103 Introduction to Literary and Critical Studies II - 3.0 credits
CH.400 World History II - 3.0 credits
Open Elective credits 9.0 - 3.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester III
In Semester Three, students take the new Symposium course and continue their distribution of electives.
SS.225 Symposium - 3.0 credits
Open Elective - 12.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester IV
In semester 4, students participate in the guided advisement of Moderation. They also take their required Theory and Practice course and continue to take electives. “Moderation” provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their studies during semesters 1-3, identify their interests and begin to focus on the concentration that will structure the final two years of their program. Moderation requires students to examine their initial experiences in the program, their goals, and their interests, to evaluate their performance and their commitment to a course of study and to chart their final two years of college with the help of a faculty committee.

Theory and Practice requirement - 3.0
SS.299 Moderation - 2.0
Open Elective credits - 9.0
Total Credits - 14.0

First Level (Years 1 and 2) Total Course Credits: 60

Second Level: In their third and senior years, students are immersed in their guided electives, minors, internships, and their senior project or honors thesis. The project or thesis is undertaken with a committee chosen from and approved by the faculty. With the help of their Moderation advisers, students develop a course of study tailored to their individual interests and faculty expertise.

Semester V
CST.390 Beyond Google II: Thesis and Information Research - 1.0 credit
Guided elective - 9.0 credits
Open elective - 6.0 credits
Total Credits - 16.0

Semester VI
Guided electives - 9.0 credits
Open electives - 6.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester VII
Guided elective - 3.0 credits
Open electives - 9.0 credits
CST.440 Senior Seminar - 3.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester VIII
You may choice two options, either a 6 credit Senior Thesis or a 3 credit Senior Thesis
CST.480 Thesis/Senior Project* - 3.0 credits
Open Electives - 12.0 credits
OR
CST.480 Thesis/Senior Project* - 6.0 credits
Open Electives - 9.0 credits

Total Credits - 15.0
Second Level (Years 3 and 4) Total Credits 61
___________
Total Credits for Degree - 121

*Senior projects carry 3 credits while more formal and in depth academic thesis carries 6 credits. If a student undertakes a 3 credit project, then they will take 12 elective credits. If a student undertakes a 6 credit thesis, they will take 9 credits.

Visit the link below for admissions requirements or to apply online. We look forward to reviewing your applications!
http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/applying/

For more information, please visit our official page at:
http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/critical_visual_studies/

BA Program in Critical & Visual Studies
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
School of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Ave.
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11205

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Congratulations to alum Selin Bucak ('12) on completing her MA degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies

Alumni/ae 2:54 PM

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Zachary Slanger and Grethen Spiegel presented with 2013 Academic Achievement Award

Announcement 5:41 PM

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2013 Senior Thesis Awards in Critical & Visual Studies, Pratt Institute

Announcement 5:09 PM

The faculty of the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies is pleased to announce its Senior Thesis Award winners for Spring 2013! Congratulations to all of our Seniors!

Distinction

Alexander J. Danckwerth.

From Weimar to Deleuze: The Early Time-Image of the German Film. (Excerpt below.)

Andrea González.

Post War Violence in Guatemala: The Case of Linchamientos. (Excerpt below.)

Honors

Amanda Picotte.

The “Dark, Evil, Enemy Within” - Violent Implications of Ideology and Rhetoric in Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Zachary Slanger.

Perverse Strategies.

Research and Methodology

Andrea González.

Post War Violence in Guatemala: The Case of Linchamientos.

Foundation for Graduate Work
Drohan J.W. DiSanto.

Relational Aesthetics and Site-Specificity.

Lara Kleinschmidt.

“Sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about the Dude here”: Achieving, Abiding, and Lebowski as a Way of Life.

Faculty Thesis Recognition Award

Katrina Bayoneto.

Confronting Nightmares: Dystopian Science Fiction Films of the Late 1990s.
Catherine Frazier.
Residual Anxiety: On Fine Artists and the Market.

Chelsea Miller.

"American Satirical Audiences Better Informed, the Relationship Between Satire and Cultural Awareness"

Gretchen Spiegel.

Living in Exile: On Nostalgia and the Ethics of Remembrance.

Andrea González. Post War Violence in Guatemala: The Case of Linchamientos.

My thesis explores the visual aspects of violence in Guatemalan indigenous communities. Specifically, I explore the role of the visual, and what I refer to as the aesthetic of cruelty, as it is enacted in the recent resurgence of linchamientos (lynchings) in the case of Guatemala.
The recent emergence of violence in Guatemala's public sphere demands that we rethink both the reasons behind this violence and the future role of local and national conceptions of justice. This recent resurgence of violence speaks to the need to reclaim a commitment to human rights, especially in an environment ravaged by both “invisible” and “visible” forms of violence. The case of Guatemala is a powerful lens by which I will explore this dynamic. In this thesis I will show how the contemporary visual culture of violence in Guatemala is bond to the history of Guatemalans; specifically extralegal forms of violence that emerged in the country Guatemala during and after the civil war (1960-1996). I will explain why, after the civil war, linchamientos emerged as a new form of extralegal violence in indigenous Mayan communities in many parts of the countryside.

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http://static.tvazteca.com/imagenes/2011/25/Cronolog-linchamientos-926713.jpg

The linchamientos that are propelled by Mayan and ladino communities, known as “popular lynchings” (Snodgrass) emerge as the reaffirmation of a struggle made visible. Communal bonds were devastated during the Civil War. As Girard recalls, the “sacrificial crisis” is founded in the cultural order, when there is lack of cultural distinction. A culture so based on the image of their patrons, on the verges of depletion makes visibility out of violence: “violence has become a collective ritual that comes to solvent the total loss of community cohesion that very much was based on the use of the image.”

Linchamientos are protests by means of “divine, sovereign” violence (Benjamin) to manifest existence. The shift of violence in the postwar years responds to a new form, for the state of exception to turn into a state of necessity, which can shift inhumanity into humanity. This is the notion of “crime as distinctiveness” that Snodgrass mentions.

The legacy of the Civil War as Snodgrass describes is mainly invisibility. Linchamientos make visible the space of the state of exception by its focus on the body. And for Agamben, these linchamientos embody a lacuna:

It is as if the juridical order (il diritto) contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which
application is suspended, but the law (la legge), as such, remains in force.

After the Civil War, the “ideological polarization” that already existed has been
magnified. Guatemalan identity is a perforated concept. In her testimony, Rigoberta Menchú remembers us how the barriers between Mayan communities and ladinos has been instrumental for the elite class that runs the country, to keep the groups oppressed. Linchamientos express visibly the Mayan struggle towards recognition from the power apparatus; they embody the tension point with the state. On one hand, their exclusion is included by its own exception (Agamben); there is a resistance to the elimination of the state of exception. On the other hand, in the space that linchamientos create, there also exists a resistance to this resistance. The visual culture of linchamientos shows “the paradoxical nature of violence” (Girard) where evil and the one who combats evil are the same. It is as if violence came from without. In this regard, Agamben writes,

In the modern era, misery and exclusion are not only economic or social concepts but eminently political categories…In this sense, our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate radically the people that is excluded.

Linchamientos make visible the created differences of the peoples of Guatemala in relation to the judicial system. These differences take place in “the domain of the corporeal and the realm of the images” (Carlin). Different peoples (Agamben) and subaltern interests collide in this space. This is the spacemade visible in the body, of the Mayan struggle, also where ladinos and Mayans struggle between themselves and against the state; in a zone where basic human rights aren’t guaranteed. Linchamientos keep redrawing the line of the state of exception (Agamben); one side to maintain it, the other to eliminate it."

Alexander J. Danckwerth. From Weimar to Deleuze: The Early Time-Image of the German Film.

The school of films known as German expressionist has long been historically pinned to very specific and particular meanings. The following is an attempt to think of the films of Germany’s Weimar Republic in a new manner, both in the context of their film-historical understanding and significance as well as within the specific framework of Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. I will argue that Deleuze only hints at the potential significance of these films due to his reading of them partly being informed (and as such, limited) by Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner’s seminal texts, From Caligari to Hitler and The Haunted Screen. These two texts are largely responsible for the historically accepted ‘version’ of what those films must have meant, hence the purpose of this paper in trying to think of them in a “new manner.”

I will first examine the fallacies of the film and art-historical readings of Weimar cinema by Kracauer and Eisner to show how they have created a rigid and impenetrable “historical imaginary” of the films (as posited by Thomas Elsaesser.) This reading ultimately limits the potential of the films to be critically analyzed and understood in other ways, outside of locating some dark element in the German soul reflected in the films that foreshadows the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Then I will show how Deleuze’s appraisal of these films follows in line with Kracauer and Eisner’s readings, and that despite his call to “look in pre-war cinema, and even in silent cinema for the workings of a very pure time-image which has always been breaking through,” he himself never returns to the films (which sit firmly in his “classical,” pre-World War II grouping) to unlock the further potential they have within his own cinematic project and for cinema in general.

....

I also want to point out that even with the analysis I have attempted, there is much more that could be said about these specific films in the context of Deleuze’s film theory, as the cinema books themselves contain such amazing depth. As such, I have only laid out a preliminary introduction to what an application of Deleuze’s theory to a specific set of films can do for both the films and the theory. For example the significance of Hitler in Deleuze’s cinema books and the notion of Hitler’s methods as metacinematic is another intensely rich topic to be explored within this field, but would require its own equally lengthy treatment to do it justice. But, hopefully with the incentive giving the German expressionist films a new treatment with Deleuze, that question can also be delved into. Much like the presence of the time-image in these films, the importance of Nazi Germany as exemplary of a metacinematic real life function also seems to be peeking around many of the corners in Deleuze’s cinema books.

More exciting than the prospect of applying Deleuze’s already-made ideas and signs to a study of film’s history is the idea that the theory can be extended in new and previously un-thought of ways, which is already taking place contemporarily with both filmmakers and theorists advancing Deleuze’s ideas (mostly in the realm of digital and cyber video that is only touched on at the end of Cinema 2.) At the same time it is important to flush out the connections in early cinema as well, to gain the most complete vision of the time-image. The pure images of time and thought, the images that must be read as much as seen are the ones that Deleuze ends his books with. He feels these are the images that constitute the most cinematically engaged films of his time and will access new images later times. Yet he is always aware of the fluid nature of the cinematic signs he identifies; “from classical to modern cinema, from the movement-image to the time-image…it is always possible to multiply the passages from one regime to the other, just as to accentuate their irreducible differences” (Deleuze Cinema 2 279.) It is this subtle awareness in his own theories that makes it easier to suggest Deleuze did not miss a connection between the time-image and Weimar cinema but rather leaves readers with a vast number of open ideas to explore, images to connect, and concepts to furnish with the ideas he provides.

Distinction

Alexander J. Danckwerth.

From Weimar to Deleuze: The Early Time-Image of the German Film. (Excerpt below.)

Andrea González.

Post War Violence in Guatemala: The Case of Linchamientos. (Excerpt below.)

Honors

Amanda Picotte.

The “Dark, Evil, Enemy Within” - Violent Implications of Ideology and Rhetoric in Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Zachary Slanger.

Perverse Strategies.

Research and Methodology

Andrea González.

Post War Violence in Guatemala: The Case of Linchamientos.

Foundation for Graduate Work
Drohan J.W. DiSanto.

Relational Aesthetics and Site-Specificity.

Lara Kleinschmidt.

“Sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about the Dude here”: Achieving, Abiding, and Lebowski as a Way of Life.

Faculty Thesis Recognition Award

Katrina Bayoneto.

Confronting Nightmares: Dystopian Science Fiction Films of the Late 1990s.

Chelsea Miller.

"American Satirical Audiences Better Informed, the Relationship Between Satire and Cultural Awareness"

Gretchen Spiegel.

Living in Exile: On Nostalgia and the Ethics of Remembrance.

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Our Program of Study: Revised Curriculum Beginning Fall 2014!

Congratulations to alum Selin Bucak ('12) on completing her MA degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies

Zachary Slanger and Grethen Spiegel presented with 2013 Academic Achievement Award

2013 Senior Thesis Awards in Critical & Visual Studies, Pratt Institute

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