Dr. Michael Allan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Oregon, and an associated faculty member of the New Media and Culture Certificate. He received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Dr. Allan primarily focuses on topics such as world literature, film and visual culture, and the history of reading for his research. His book, In the Shadows of World Literature, examines how traditions and practices in world literature affect the very act of reading and is to be published by Princeton University in April.
Dr. Allan will be teaching a course this fall in the Comparative Literature department titled “Transmedial Aesthetics,” which will explore how we read in relation to different forms of media. Students will read works from different nations, traditions, and languages in order to gain a better understanding of key problems in the field and the ability to critically analyze different types of media through various writing assignments. Authors read for the course will include Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Galloway, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, and Marshall McLuhan. The following is a description of the course, courtesy of Dr. Allan:
“Common as it is to think of textual form in relation to language, history and culture, in what ways does attention to media transform how we read? This course takes seriously what it means to compare across media and expands critical methods beyond textual form. With explorations ranging from discourse analysis and phenomenology to structuralism and objected-oriented-ontology, we will draw together media historians, cultural theorists and new media scholars to consider a number of key questions: How does an image differ from a picture? What is the relation between text and world? How does perspective relate to frame? How does the interface relate to phenomenology? Each week takes a key aspect of media aesthetics to move beyond analysis based on language and culture towards a consideration of networks, reflexivity and the senses. The course will pair together readings with films, photographs and videos, all with the goal of collapsing the boundaries of theory and practice. Reading back and forth across history, we will consider media’s past and future in an effort to enact comparativism not only as a translational and transnational model of inquiry, but as the groundwork for transmedial aesthetics.”
You can find more information about Dr. Allan, his research, and his recently offered courses here.
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