Week 9: Wall-E

Today (10/20) we will be watching Andrew Stanton's Wall-E (2008). Film is a text and it demands to be interpreted critically just as any written work does. As we watch Wall-E, I want you to answer the following questions. You will read these questions before attending our screening and you will print these questions out and take notes as we watch the movie. You will turn in the study questions the day we conclude our discussion (10/22). Your answers will be typed.

1. What does this film have to say about work?

2. What does this film have to say about consumption and buying?

3. Wall-E is a collector. Explain how Wall-E produces property using John Locke's theories of labor?

4. Wall-E plays homage to the silent film comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. What role does sound play in the film? Who gets to speak and who does not? What role does language play in the film? 

5. What is the film's point of view on the light-track on which everything moves on The Axiom? What does this say about freedom, creativity, etc.?

Week 6.2: Bertolt Brecht & 3 Penny Opera

Although he would later try to pass himself off as having peasant origins, Bertolt Brecht was born to a conventionally middle class family in Bavaria in 1898. When World War I broke out, Brecht avoided service until he was eventually drafted. He served as a medical orderly far from the front. In the late 1910s, Brecht began getting involved in the theater, first writing drama reviews, and then directing and writing his first play Baal. He would continue to produce plays in Germany until the Nazis took power when he became an expatriate, eventually settling in the United States and doing some work for Hollywood. During the Cold War, Brecht left the United States and eventually settled in East Berlin. While he continued to write plays, they did not achieve the same notoriety of his earlier work. He died in 1956 of a heart attack.

Brecht was committed to Marxism for most of his adult life and his hope was for his plays to serve Marxist purposes. As such, he wanted his plays to have an instructive quality that would cut through bourgeois ideology. Brecht hopped to accomplish this by what he called "verfremdungseffekt" or "alienation effect." Unlike naturalist theater which tries to sustain the illusion of realism, Brecht attempted to point out to his audience that they were in fact watching a play. The audience is intended to observe themselves watching a play and export this critical skill to the world outside the theater.

Viewing & Reading:
Required: 3 Penny Opera, dir. G. W. Pabst
Screening will be September 30, 5:30 PM. The film is on reserve at the library.
Recommended: Brecht essays on theater (PDF) Reading is in our class packet


Study Question
1. What does the film have to say about society? What was the implicit argument of the film?

2. Bring in three discussion questions about 3 Penny Opera. These questions will be answered by your fellow students in class.

3. Summarize Brecht's main points in the reading for next session. What is the epic theater? What does Brecht want it to do? How might these ideas reflect what Pabst does with his adaptation of Brecht's Three Penny Opera? (3 pts e/c)

Week 2.2: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Joseph Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin (1778)

Arguably the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century, Max Weber (1864-1920) is known as a principal architect of modern social science along with Karl Marx and Emil Durkheim. Weber's wide-ranging contributions gave critical impetus to the birth of new academic disciplines such as sociology and public administration as well as to the significant reorientation in law, economics, political science, and religious studies. His methodological writings were instrumental in establishing the self-identity of modern social science as a distinct field of inquiry; he is still claimed as the source of inspiration by empirical positivists and their hermeneutic detractors alike. More substantively, Weber's two most celebrated contributions were the “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times, and the “Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy of modern capitalism. Together, these two theses helped launch his reputation as one of the founding theorists of modernity. In addition, his avid interest and participation in politics led to a unique strand of political realism comparable to that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. As such, Max Weber's influence was far-reaching across the vast array of disciplinary, methodological, ideological and philosophical reflections that are still our own and increasingly more so. (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

Read:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 120 (first section), 1-20 (middle of the page), 23-28

Watch: 

Study Questions:

1. Weber structures his argument inductively, meaning that rather than starting with a thesis he works from examples and from that generates a conclusion. While this is a perfectly logical way of structuring an essay, if you are used to a more deductive form of argumentation it might seem unwelcoming. In order to help your comprehension of the piece, I would like you to summarize pages one through seven. What is the problem that Weber poses? Where does he seek to find the solution?

2. How does Benjamin Franklin represent the "spirit of capitalism"? How does this relate to the concept of a "calling"?