Graduate Courses Spring 2005
CL466 Literature and CinemaLect. MW - 2:30-3:45 - 386 Van Hise
Disc. W - 12:05 - 574 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
A study of the interrelation among the arts during the classic modernist period, 1857 to 1959, with the main emphasis placed upon the changes that literature undergoes after the advent of cinema, ca. 1895. Students will take stock of the extensive intermedia experimentations among the arts and the frequent crossing of generic boundaries within literature during this seminal period. Dime novels, comic strips, verse plays, calligrams–these hybrid forms challenge the idea of an official literary history as well as a strict distinction between high culture and popular culture. As cinema’s dominant form becomes narrative, the new art may be compared to the novel in terms of its story-telling capacties. Consequently, the semiotic specificities of each art form, each medium, will be open for debate.
The course is divided into five units:
• the revolution in seeing ushered in by impressionist painting and Japanese prints, the ideology of the visible deriving from Renaissance perspective, and the development of film sensibility amidst a fin-de-siècle decadence;
• narrative as a system of semiotic relations that both permit exchanges between film and novel, even as economic factors unique to print culture and to the movie industry mitigate such an exchange;
• cinematic form in literature: multiple perspectivism, time shifts, montage...;
• mass cultural forms vs. the avant-garde; the critique of consumerism;
• shaping of postmodernist sensibility by radical departures in film form.
Requirements for the course:
☞ class attendance and film screenings (held in “lab” every other week), plus discussion section for those enrolled for 4 credits;
☞ mid-term exam;
☞ analytic paper (5 pages);
☞ final paper requiring original research (10-15 pages)
* Theoretical readings include: Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition, Eisenstein, Film Form; Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, selections (in photocopied Reader) from W. Benjamin, E. Panofsky, Arnheim, Balazs, Bazin, Barthes, et. al.
* Primary readings include: Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” Joyce, excerpt - Ulysses; Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman
* Films include: “Primitives” such as Lumière, Méliès, Porter; Eisenstein, The Old and the New, Lang, Metropolis, Kurosawa, Rashomon, Coppola, The Conversation
CL 473 Literature and Myth
Lect. TR - 2:30-3:45 - 374 Van Hise
Disc. T - 1:20 - 478
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
A study of myth is a difficult, perhaps impossible task; at least if, following such authors as Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, one deconstructs the traditional opposition between muthos and logos (incidentally, one can find the seeds of such deconstruction in Plato, the supposed founder of Western logocentrism). If myth, including the myth of logos, tends to occupy the totality of social, political, and cultural space (the modern absence of myth is a myth, says Bataille), there seems to be no place from which to analyze myth in a non-mythic, scientific way (a rigorous logic of myth is necessarily a "mythics," says Nancy). In this course, we shall consider literature as the place of myths origin, of its absence (the myth of the society without myth), and especially of its interruption, and thus perhaps the only place of resistance to the
totalitarian system of mytho-logy (even, some would suggest, to totalitarianism itself). We shall examine some ancient and modern texts that found or attempt to revive Western myths, and those that initiate their interruption (which might in fact be the same texts).
Readings may include texts by: Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Herder, Schelling, Kleist, Nietzsche, Casirer, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, Rilke, Anouilh, Cocteau, Camus, Barthes, Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.
CL771 Literary Criticism: States of Theory
R @ 4:00-6:30 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Próspero Saíz -
Ph. (608) 262-1158 - 956 VanHise
We start with a question: Today, what are the states of critical "theory" (in the general--not the Frankfurt School--sense of the term)? In order to approach the question, we must raise questions about theory itself, such as, what is the nature of "theory," which means asking after its history, presuppositions, its limitations, its effects, and its possibilities. Or again: how do the different forms of theory join critical practices? Here we will seriously consider whether theorizing has inhibited the critical process itself. For it is possible that every theoretical "ism" attempts to protect itself by its announced or unannounced restrictive effects, as well as by its claims of ownership or guardianship of its foundations. Our task will be to analyze the assumptions, presuppositions, and limitations of some significant critical theories of the last thirty years or so. This means that we will have to question the givens of various critical textual fields--that we not simply accept the givens as determining. It also means that we must attempt to grasp how some "dominant" theories have become institutionalized in the university.
We will organize our study (1) around the problem of "the irresolution of epistemic differences," as reported by Herman Rapaport; (2) around issues concerning the "micropolitics of critical theory,"as articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, with special attention given to rhizomatic possibilities; (3) around Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend and ethics; (4) around Paul de Man's critique of aesthetics; and (5) around Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the questions that literature and the teaching of literature put to the university.
REQUIREMENTS: each student, in consultation with the instructor, will research and write on a critical theory area of his/her choice, e.g., feminism, structuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, deconstruction, or compromise formations such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies and New Historicism. In addition, each student will write a 1-2 pp. position paper on one of the following: (1) the question of history, (2) the question of aesthetics, (3) the question of critique,(4) the question of ethics. And a second 2 pp. position paper on one of the following general approaches: (1) formal analysis, (2) content analysis,(3)ethical analysis, (4)social analysis, (5)psychological analysis, (6)aesthetic analysis, (7)philosophical analysis.
TEXTS:
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, Toward A Minor Literature
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology
Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine
Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity
ARTICLES:
Giorgio Agamben, "The Original Structure of the Work of Art"
Jacques Derrida, "Some Statements & Truisms About Neo-logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, & Other Small Seismisms"
Jean-Luc Nancy, "Finite History"
Wolfgang Iser, "The Aesthetic and the Imaginary"
J. Hillis Miller, "Face to Face: Plato's Protagoras as a Model For Collective Research in the Humanities"
Jean-Francois Lyotard, "After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics
CL 975 The Invention of Aethetics
M @ 4:00 - 6:30 - 374 Van Hise Hall
Professor Adler - hadler@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-9863 - 870 Van Hise
Aesthetics were not always what they are considered to be today. The discipline was first labeled “aesthetics” in 1735 and elaborated fragmentarily in 1750/58 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. He developed an idea of aesthetics that went far beyond a theory of the arts or the beautiful. His concept of aesthics was situated at a high level of epistemology and psychology. With this idea, Baumgarten developed a discipline that was supposed to fill a gap in the contemporary philosophical system, but as a matter of fact eroded the system from the inside and created a new holistic discourse about the human being. What Baumgarten envisioned as an integral part of the then contemporary philosophical system failed to pass the test of transcendental philosophy of the Kantian mold and fell victim to two centuries of collective oblivion. In this seminar we will first read texts of pre-Kantian aesthetics in order to watch how a new concept comes into being and how it relates to the European context (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz, Locke). Then, we will read and contextualize Kant’s aesthetics within his system of transcendental philosophy. Readings of Romantic texts concerning aesthetics as well as parts of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics will follow. The goal of this seminar is to heighten the awareness of a suppressed concepts of aesthetics that has resurfaced vigorously over the past two decades within the context of continental philosophy and postmodern thinking. All participants will give a 30 minute presentation on a limited topic and write a research paper. The topics will be decided upon in close contact with me.
Text:
There will be a reader
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the power of judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer.
Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press
2000. ISBN (paperback) 0 521 34892 7.