In this course, we will study major texts of French and British Literature in
the context of history: both "high" and "low." That is, we will look at major
events, such as revolutions and conservative responses to radical political
activity, but we will also look at the way minor events also tell the story of
artistic production and social struggles: histories of travel and tourism, of
fashion, of technology, of cities, and of things themselves. Possible authors
to discuss: Victor Hugo, Benjamin Constant, Francois-René de Chateaubriand,
Alfred Victor de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Stendhal, Maria
Edgeworth, Byron, Charlotte Smith, Radcliffe, Godwin, Wordsworth,
Wollstonecraft.
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This course will examine the persistence with which the concept of the political has been articulated through the aesthetic. Taking its cue from Schiller's demand that the only way to solve the problem of the political is to approach it through the aesthetic, this course will trace the history of this aesthetic-political project as it is reformulated in the 20th century. As an introduction to this topic we will begin with the first explict articulation of the political in terms of the aesthetic by Schiller and the subsequent treatment of this relation by Marx in the German Ideology. The seminar will then follow this relation as it is taken up in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, and Giorgio Agamben. A major part of this course will be devoted to a comprehensive reading of Adorno's last work, the Aesthetic Theory, in the context of the politics of the Frankfurt School. Issues to be taken up include the fate of this aesthetic-political project as it passes through deconstruction and issues into postcolonial theory and alterity politics; the social organization of individuality through judgment and criticism, the aestheticization of the individual within the political, the place of difference within the political project, and the precise nature of the problem that the aesthetic is called upon to address within the political.
Course Texts:
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Marx, Karl, from The German Ideology
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political.
Benjamin, Walter, various writings on “shock”
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory.
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension.
Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech.
Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement.
Badiou, Alain. Peut-on penser la politque?
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The course is meant to introduce basic issues in comparative literature and basic problems in literary history, and to provide an overview of history and rationale of the discipline, traditional areas of research, and recent developments. The hypothesis we will take as our starting point is that of a historical and theoretical link between the discipline of comparative literature and the event of exile, but, even more so, between literature as such and the experience of exile. We will be reading works of fiction from contemporary novelists, such as W. G. Sebald, David Malouf and Christian Ransmayr, but also works of ancient and modern poetry (by Ovid and Edmund Jabes), modernist fictions by Conrad, Nabokov, Joyce, and Karen Blixen, along with critical works by, among others, Gayatry Spivak, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Terry Eagleton, Helene Cixous, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
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This course has two purposes: first, to survey (very selectively) the history of western poetics from Plato, Aristotle, and Horace to the present, with an emphasis from the nineteenth century forward on experimental poetics; and second, to propose an account of poetic functions (from Sappho to recent poetry) as a way of noting and assessing the continued urgency of poems. Class time will be divided between discussions of theoretical pieces and manifestos and close-readings of poems channeled through a consideration of function.
After a brief reading of "the ancients" and Renaissance and Neo-classical theorists (e.g. Sidney and Dryden), we will turn to the radical poetry and manifestos of the British poets Blake (including a reading of his prophetic work Milton) and Shelley and the philosophical poetics of the fragment (and the future of open-form poetry) in the Jena School in Germany (Novalis and F. Schlegel). This will lead to explorations of the poetics of Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Mallarme, and then the Surrealists in their manifestos. At some point we will look at the manifestos and the poetic functions of the poetry of so-called traditional societies (Jerome Rothenberg's gathering in the anthology Technicians of the Sacred).
Woven into discussions of these readings will be the presentation, in the presence of a small cluster of poems, of poetic functions . We will use Allen Grossman's The Sighted Singer, a primer of poetic commonplaces, for a grounding in a phenomenological account of poems (e.g. What is the nature of the poetic line and the meaning of its length? What is the nature of the lyric voice? What is the difference between a "collective" and a "social" perspective in poetry? What is the difference between a poetics of scarcity and a poetics of abundance?) Further topics include: the centrality, in older poetry, of animation and personification; the importance, for experimental and visionary poetry, of parataxis and metonymy; the relationship between the poetic and the holy; the function of transformation of perception, of de-familiarization. We will also consider the horizons of traditional formal poetry, with stress on "sound" (e.g. Lear and Carroll, on the one hand, and Khlebnikov, on the other) and with stress on the visual (e.g. the hieroglyph of Herbert and of Mallarme in "A Throw of the Dice," and the engraved poems of Blake). We will, throughout, consider the literary politics of a "poetics of closure" with its emphasis on closed forms and the drama of the lyric speaker, and a "poetics of aperture" with its emphasis on open forms and the (often celebratory) account of the world. With this in mind, we will conclude with modern and contemporary debates about the viability of the lyric-from Brecht and Adorno, to Barbara Guest, to the Language Poets like Lyn Hejinian, and constructionists like Barrett Watten and Robert Kaufmann.
There will be one oral report and a major paper required. It is hoped that "poets" as well as "critics" can benefit from the course.
For more information, contact Professor Robinson at Jeffrey.Robinson@colorado.edu.
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The course is meant to provide an introduction to the fundemental problems of literary criticism and literary history, with a specific focus on the German literary tradition, and to provide a basic training in the use of reference tools for conducting research, as well as in the preparation of scholarly manuscripts. Same as GRMN 5010.
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A study of contemporary queer theory and cultural experience as it is manifested in theoretical and artistic texts. Our focus will be on literature-novels and autobiography, but the class will also explore examples from film and photography. Literary texts will include Mark Doty's "Firebird," Leslie Feinberg's "Stone Butch Blues," Sarah Waters' "Tipping the Velvet," and autobiographical sketches from Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins, eds, "GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary." As well, we will view Jennie Livingston's film, "Paris is Burning" and queer photography from the 1997 Guggenheim Museum exhibit, "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography," along with Del Grace Volcano's photographs from "The Drag King Book." Critical theorists will include Judith Butler on identity construction, Riki Wilchins on genderqueer, Jonathon Dollimore on camp, Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp on drag queens, Regan Rhyne on racializing white drag, Judith Halberstam on female masculinity, Jose Esteban Munoz on disidentification and Cuban-American queer feminist performance art, and Sue-Ellen Case on butch-femme camp aesthetic.
For more information, contact Professor Juhasz at Suzanne.Juhasz@colorado.edu.
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The work of the seminar will triangulate or circulate among three key texts: Benjamin's Arcades Project; Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever; and Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz, with respect to the question of the witness. And with respect to the question of the reader / viewer / critic as witness.
In the Arcades Project (Passagenwerk) Walter Benjamin projected a critique of the 'narcotic historicism' of modern capitalism (which he saw as the true religion of modernity, the successor to and metamorphosis of reformation theology), rearticulating the unstable relations between art, commodity and fetish into a theory of 'dialectical imaging.' The Arcades Project (Passagenwerk) was published 42 years after Benjamin's death in an edition of 1982 by Rolf Tiedemann, as volume 5 of Benjamin's Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften), prepared with the cooperation of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem. We will explore the challenges Benjamin's work raises for the ways in which we interpret cultural practices conventionally grouped under the academic rubrics of art, architecture, museology, and literature. We shall also examine Benjamin's enduring fascination with collecting / archiving as one of the defining practices of modernity and its implications for his concept of allegory.
Which relates to Jacques Derrida's movement in his Archive Fever (Mal d'Archive: une impression freudienne, 1995) towards articulating the archive as always an anxious, perpetually expansive translation of its original (lost) idea. This is a text that is itself a triangulation among the retrospectivist myth of Judaic exceptionalism; Freudian psychoanalysis; and the phenomenon of email, which revolutionized relations between public and private space-time, prefigured in Benjamin's Project.
All of which entail the question of testimony: at whose core, according to Giorgio Agamben, is a lacuna, something impossible to bear witness to (like the face of the Gorgon; or the 'living dead' in the camps, called Musselmaenner), in Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz, 1999). All of which evokes the emptiness at the heart of the city; of the arcades: that unrelenting absence framed by the frames of the city. By the material; the very thingness, of the commodity. By the self in cyberspace-time: the self as artifice.
All in relation to the question What is to be done, here, now, today, right where we are, in fabricating a future? How to articulate a future, as Benjamin (and also Derrida & Agamben) write, that is founded upon a critique of 'narcotic historicism'?
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Have artists always written about their own work? Where did the idea of the artist as a writer originate and how did it come to define the modern idea of the artist as an intellectual?
The work of this seminar will focus on the construction of modern identity by examining the historical idea of the artist as an intellectual and exemplary subject of the modern nation-state. What are the contemporary iterations of this historical idea? This seminar will juxtapose twentieth-century and contemporary writers such as Foucault, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Agamben, Zizek, and others who write about the role of media and art in the construction of the modern subject in society, with the longer history of the idea of the artist as a great thinker who leaves an intellectual legacy. The artist as intellectual is an idea that took shape during the early modern era in Europe. What enabled this modern myth to take shape? Who owns this idea now? Who only rents it? Etc. etc.
The career of Leonardo da Vinci will provide a case study for investigating the historical idea of the artist as writer and art theorist. Leonardo's unpublished writings on painting were compiled posthumously by a series of editors into one of the most important texts on art ever written. First published in Paris in 1651 in French and Italian editions, Leonardo's abridged Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura/Traite de la peinture), was the basis for academic artistic instruction for three centuries. When the system for instructing artists in academies outlived its usefulness toward the end of the nineteenth century, Leonardo's writings were rediscovered by avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky, and by writers such as Paul Valery and Walter Benjamin, who had access to his notebooks through new anthologies and facsimile editions. Depending on the interests of the students who take this seminar, we will explore Duchamp's, or Max Ernst's, or Benjamin's, or even Dan Brown's idea of Leonardo; but more urgently, we will explore the (post)modern construct of the artist as intellectual/the intellectual as an artist.
The format of the seminar will be weekly discussion of assigned readings and a final research paper or other creative project on some aspect of the modern notion of artists as writers/theorists.
This course also satisfies Renaissance/Early Modern area for MA art history students.
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Fall '08 Courses
