This course, one of four “Engagements” courses you’ll take as a first-year student, focuses on aesthetics—that is, various kinds of transformative encounters with art, literature, performance, and environment. Sensibilities that we absorb from our social world, our surroundings, and our experiences guide our views of particular forms of expression and style over time, motivating how we engage with and interpret our world. All of us––as makers of all kinds––design and curate our daily lives and reinterpret our worlds. These aesthetic interventions can reveal vital ways of thinking about our present, our past, and about whom we might become in the future.
A course in “Engaging Aesthetics” will help you:
- experience, describe, analyze, and create;
- think critically about the nature of art and artistry;
- become aware of how aesthetic experience underlies social life; and
- reflect on the differences that shape aesthetic expressions and hierarchies.