Graduate Courses Fall 2006

CL475: Poetics & Literary Theory: Literary Representation
Lecture: MW 2:30 - 3:45 - 144 Van Hise
Disc: M 4:00 - 474 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph: 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise Hall

To free ourselves from the constraints of a representational mode of dealing with the world has often been proclaimed as the task of modern and contemporary philosophy, literature, and art. One could think of such influential figures in the West as Hölderlin and Heidegger, Artaud and Deleuze, Newman and Lyotard. But is such a thing possible? Other thinkers of our time, such as Derrida or Nancy, claim that it is not, because of the very structure of language, and they maintain that the play of deconstruction that brings representation to a "closure" is the only way to undermine the reign of representation. The purpose of this course is to investigate the modes of representation that have dominated Western literature and art throughout its history and their major theorizations in order to be able to take a position in the debate over representational thinking � a major aesthetic, but also philosophical, religious, and political debate of our time.

Course readings may include:
Homer, Odyssey
Petronius, Satyricon
Stendahl, Le Rouge et le noir
Balzac, Père Goriot
Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Auerbach, "Figura," Mimesis
Heidegger, Nietzsche ; Poetry, Language, Thought
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
Brecht, A Short Organon for the Theater
Ricoeur, On Mimesis
Foucault, The Order of Things, This is Not a Pipe
Derrida, "La Parole soufflé," "Closure of Representation"
Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography
Marin, On Representation (selections)

CL 778: Literary, Historical, Philosophical, political and/or cultural roots of given tendencies
T 5:00-7:30 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
958 Van Hise - 262-7862

The history of the reflection on literature in the West has often been situated in the framework of the opposition between philosophy and literature (Plato's "quarrel," for example, or Nietzsche's "discordance"). This opposition could be seen as a confrontation ( Auseinandersetzung ), or even as a dialogue ( Zwiesprache ), one that already began in Antiquity with Homer and Plato, Sophocles and Aristotle, and continued in the Middle Ages with Dante and Thomas Aquinas and in modern times with Racine and Descartes. In this course, we will question the possibility of such a dialogue, focusing on the basic terms around which the discussion of the status and of the value of literature has usually been theorized in the West, such as being and mimesis, truth and lie, order and anarchy. We will consider the relationship between poetry and other domains, such as ethics, politics, religion, etc., where these terms and the debates that they generate are also of paramount importance.

Readings may include:

Philosophical texts:
Plato: Phaedrus , Republic , Symposium , Ion
Aristotle: Poetics , Rhetoric , Metaphysics (selections), Nichomachean Ethics Books 1 & 6
Longinus: On the Sublime
Augustine: On Christian Doctrine
Aquinas: De Veritate
Dante: Letter to Can Grande
Descartes: Meditations , Discourse on Method

Literary texts:

Homer: The Iliad
Sappho: collected poems
Sophocles: Oedipus the King , Antigone , Oedipus at Colonus
Apuleius: The Golden Ass
Dante: The Inferno
Cervantes: Don Quixote (selections)
Shakespeare: Henry IV , Parts 1 & 2
Corneille, Le Cid
Racine: Phèdre
Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves

CL974 Problems in the Lyric and Long Poem
R 4:00-6:30 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Próspero Saíz

956 Van Hise - 262-1158

We begin our study with a singular question: does poetry have a function in today’s technological world? It is a truism that the modern and contemporary technical world loathes poetry, but this is nothing new. For example, “Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets....” (Seneca, Epistles, 49.5). Poetry, especially the lyric, has died many deaths or is always dying. The reasons for this are complex, and we will study them, with focus on the following: First, a formal, critical and theoretical reason–historically, lyric poetry eludes generic forms, constantly transforms itself, and subverts or frustrates modern generic impulses. Second, a socio-political reason–ancient Greek lyric poetry had a deep commitment to communitas, which was subsequently lost, although historically there has been a constant effort made by poets to retrieve this commitment. In order to grasp the significance of these two reasons, we will do some background work on ancient lyric modes and their connections to modern lyric poetry and the “long poem.” This should prepare us to take up the core problematic raised by the third reason–the devolution of technology itself.
The seminar is organized around problems which emerge from the “poetic constellations” listed below. Our poets and their respective “poetic constellations” are historically situated in sites of contention. The sites are geographical, cultural, political, artistic, etc., and may be governed by technology. This governance is contested by poetry; yet poetry itself is also strangely imbricated in technology’s modern historical swerve. Technology is operative wherever something–including poetry–is produced, something is brought to light, or wherever something is carried out or set in motion. We will trace the relationship of poetry to technology and briefly examine the epochal exigency of poetry in the time of the gods and muses and ask this question: whence arises the exigency to which modern poetry responds, when the gods are dead or departed, and when science and scientific technique produce and project almost everything? In our time, science and technology have sought to determine the mode and possibilities of our abode in the world. Our first modern constellation is constituted around Holderlin’s resounding question: what are poets for in a destitute time? We will elucidate his powerful provocation and follow its full implications, including his approach to the experience of the advent of the poetic word and the status of the poet. Holderlin says, “In that precisely the poet with the pure tone of his original sensibility feels himself grasped in his whole inner and outer life and takes a look around at his world, just so is this new and unknown to him: the sum of all his experience, his knowledge, his intuition, his memory, art, and nature as shown in him and outside of him–everything is as if for the first time, [my italics] and hence present to him as indeterminate, unconceived, dissolved in pure matter and life. And it is especially important in this instant that he take nothing as given, that he start from nothing positive, and that nature and art, as he had earlier learned and sees them, do not speak before a language is there for him.”
Our other constellations are represented by: Rimbaud–the unknown and the time of sleep; Trakl–wandering and estrangement in the time of speechless mourning; Mallarmé–naming the essential in poetry as a pursuit of black and white, the blank space; Vallejo–poetic inscription as witness to time and the absurd; Celan–poetic writing as witness to art’s “dumb” trajectory in its most intimate involvement with technology and politics; Williams–poetry as poetics or intellectualized art, losing the realm of sensuous appearance; the Language Poets–linguistic practice as the renewal of poetry as revolutionary language and language as revolution, in the pursuit of a new consciousness through the production of effects which are critical rather than aesthetic (hyper-formalism).

Each student will select a constellation for research; students are encouraged to find and explore other brilliant, related clusters or gatherings through the works of other poets of their choice.

TEXTS:
Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan
Friedrich Holderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments
Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat
Ron Silliman (ed.), In The American Tree [anthology]
Georg Trakl, Autumn Sonata
César Vallejo, Trilce
William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays
W.R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry

There will be two “Readers”: (1) Selections of modern poems and (2) Critical/theoretical essays (including essays by Bernstein, Blanchot, Bruns, Derrida, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Gadamer)