How to Disappear Completely

This course will consist of an interdisciplinary inquiry into modes of disappearance, vanishing, becoming invisible, and getting lost in modern literature, music, and film.
 
Beginning with an appraisal of Lana del Rey (“How to Disappear”) and Radiohead (“How to Disappear Completely”), the course’s canon will span a wide spectrum of artworks, including literary classics such as H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and more contemporary works like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. A particular focus will lie on the works of Franz Kafka whose later writings explicitly probe an ontology of phenomenal de-constitution (“aphanisis”), as can be seen in seminal texts such as “Josefine, the Singer; or the Mouse Folk” and “The Starvation Artist.” Kafka’s texts were most notably analyzed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who aptly observe a practice of “becoming- imperceptible” in this type of literature. Looking at Tom Holland’s 1996 movie Thinner will give us the opportunity to explore the process of emaciation as a trope of body horror. The course will culminate in an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho, in which nothing less than the disappearance of language itself is at stake. Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent study Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons (Zone, 2021) will provide a critical touchstone for our analytical efforts. 
 
All students with a curious mind are welcome.