Thinking with Accidents

3 Credits.

When is an action or a work of art just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? This course explores the problems and complications of willed actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. We will follow (primarily but not exclusively) a range of different modernist writers, surrealist and dada artists, noir filmmakers, and twentieth-century philosophers as they contemplate what an intentional action is or is not. What can these works tell us about how we make meaning at the limits of our control? Includes literature of Wallace Stevens, Nathanael West, James Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Ann Petry; films of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Justine Triet; art of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton; and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot.