The arts providing the vocabulary that can permit discussion of hidden or uncharted themes
19 Novembro 2018, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
This semester the three books selected for discussion all deal with themes of central relevance to contemporary society - migration, displacement, dealing with war and conflict, the rise and consequences of populism to mention but a few. However, because the novels are fictional, they permit exploring avenues that factual texts would not allow. In their oral presentations students pursued these avenues and it was a very powerful exercise.
In this class, I wanted to show students a film that illustrates how the arts, in this case a film, can provide vocabulary that can allow for society to discuss a topic that had always existed but had not been discussed seriously because the vocabulary did not exist that would allow for this discussion - feeding into the theories presented by Miranda Fricker in
Epistemic Injustice.
The film screened was George Cuker's
Gaslight (1944) which introduced the term "gaslighting" to describe psychological intimation of another.