The course examines the relation between concepts of modernity and figurations of ghostly time in film, philosophy and literature. We begin with a reading of Hamlet, laying the groundwork for a study of the influence of the play on 20th Century thought. The second part focuses on works by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce; on philosophical texts by Nietzsche, Derrida and Deleuze (especially their readings of Hamlet), and on films by Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam. Special attention will be paid to the relation between time and technology, the figure of the ghost, the theme of falsehood (the role of the simulacrum in the twentieth century representations of time), and the conventions of genre (tragic time vs comic time).
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