LIT 402(F) Issues in Literary and Cultural Theory: The Fashioning of Fashion: Theory and Practice

"Fashion," Roland Barthes wrote, "is too serious and too frivolous at the same time." As a product of culture, at once trivial and essential, fashion exhibits a compulsion to create signs, to reproduce changing meanings, and to agitate, as well as normalize, the perpetual play of difference and novelty. The course will examine fashion as a system of communication; a network of variable signs; a writing (on and of the body); an ideology of socially constructed images of femininity and masculinity; a meeting point for gender, class, and political relations of power; a system for controlling the eroticized body; a temporal whirlwind of impermanence and change ("the ecstasy of the new"); a playing-out of the forces of desire and consumption; an instrument for plundering and recycling the styles of the past; and, finally, a reality of everyday life constitutive of social order, collective fantasy, and personal self-definition. We will explore the ways that fashion-in particular clothing, perfume, and cosmetics, as mediated by strategies of representation (i.e., advertising, publicity, photography, media, literature, art, cinema, consumer culture)-create, reproduce, and disseminate a certain kind of "imaginary," where fictions of desire, eroticism, aesthetics, and myth circulate. Three general goals will orient our study: first, to understand how the sign systems of fashion, fashion history, and fashion advertising produce meaning and value within culture; second, to examine the "imaginary" of desire, fantasy, and identity produced by the creation and marketing of clothes, perfume, and cosmetics; and third, to analyze the "rewriting" of face and body (the phenomenon of the "makeover") which fashion seeks to inspire. Attention will be given: 1) to the history of fashion, perfume and cosmetics, primarily, but not exclusively, in nineteenth and twentieth-century France and twentieth-century America; 2) to the representation of fashion in works of literature (Balzac, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, Proust, Calvino, Suskind, Robbins), cinema (Funny Face, Unzipped, Prêt-à-Porter), and cultural and feminist theory (Barthes, Baudrillard, Lipovetsky, Bordo, Bartky, Simmel, Corbin); 3) to the collaboration of designer, fashion house, model, wearer, and spectator in the creation and dissemination of fashion; 4) to the links between fashion and "spectacle," fashion and postmodernism, fashion and fetishism, fashion and domination; and 5) to fashion as both the endless play of difference ("a signification without a message," Baudrillard) and the interlacing of desire and death (Benjamin). Requirements: active participation in class discussions, oral presentations, one 6-page paper, and one 10- to 12-page final paper. Enrollment limited to 20.

Hour: STAMELMAN