Course materials 2015/16
Overview
The work of the seminar will fall into three sections, focusing on the following thinkers and texts:
- Augustine, Confessions (Signet Classics, translation by Rex Warner)
- Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (Everyman, edited by Helen McNeil)
- Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Alma Books)
Please use these editions of the texts. This will allow us to have common reference points in class, and these are the editions you will be allowed to bring into the exam at the end of the year. Augustine and Dickinson will be studied during Term 1 and McCarthy during Term 2.
Weeks 1-3
Augustine, Confessions
Wk 1 – Learning to read and write: words, books, attention, restlessness
Monday – Introduction to the class—Augustine, Dickinson and McCarthy—and to the Confessions (passages from Bk I)
Thursday – Discussion of Bks VI and VIII*
Presentation Take it and read Andrew Piper, ch. 1, Book Was There -- Roshni
*See esp. VI.3 on Ambrose reading, and garden scene VIII.8-12; see excerpt from Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, on VI.8.
Wk 2 – Good and evil
Monday – Discussion of Bks II-III*
Presentation on Charles Taylor, ‘“In interiore homine”’, ch. 7, Sources of the Self -- Tom
*See esp. the pears in II.4-10, and III.2, 4-7.
Thursday – Discussion of Bks IV and IX*
Presentation on Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Augustine and the “problem” of time’, ch. 1, Being in Time
See esp. IV.4-11 on friendship and IX.8-13 on mother’s life and death.
Week 3 – Memory, time, literature and being
Monday – Discussion of Bk X
Presentation on Mark Currie, 'The Present', ch.2, About Time -- Bethan
Thursday – Discussion of Bk XI and summary discussion
Presentation on Mark Currie, 'Temporality and Self-Distance', ch. 4, About Time -- Hannah
Weeks 4-5 and 7
Emily Dickinson
Week 4 – Poetry, personae, profession
Monday – Introduction to Dickinson; hooks and headlines
Poems to discuss will include 712, 1129, 303, 441, 67
Thursday – Making poetry; waxing lyrical?
Poems to discuss will include 320, 617, 449, 1562, 709, 312, 448, 613
Presentation on Virginia Jackson, 'Lyric Reading' (first half and second half), ch. 2, Dickinson’s Misery -- Eleanor
Week 5 – Mind, body, self
Monday – perception: limits, construction and expansion
Poems to discuss include 1071, 365, 285
Presentation on Marianne Noble, ‘Dickinson on perception and consciousness: a dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in ED and Philosophy -- Tess
Thursday – ‘Me from Myself – to banish –’
Poems to discuss include 642, 315, 650, 465, 280, 670
Presentation on Timothy Gould, ‘Intensity and its audiences: toward a feminist perspective on the Kantian sublime’, in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics
Week 7 – Knowing, understanding, loving, destroying
Monday – reading Dickinson with the pragmatists
Poems presented in Tursi
Presentation on Renée Tursi, ‘Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism and the Conquests of Mind’, in Emily Dickinson and Philosophy -- Belle
Presentation on Victor Kestenbaum, ‘“Meaning on the Model of Truth”: Dewey and Gadamer on Habit and Vorurteil’ (section with ED; surrounding sections) -- Kate
Thursday – Size, power, love, and of course death
Poems to consider include 187, 193, 252, 273, 601, 640, 754, 875, 889, 985
Summary discussion
See also Anne-Lise Francois, excerpt from Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience
Term 2: Weeks 1-3
McCarthy, Remainder
Week 1
Monday – Re-enactment
Discussion of Remainder, Chapters 1-6
Presentation on Vanessa Agnew, "What is re-enactment?" Criticism, 2004
Thursday – The Real Experience, Simulacra, Authenticity
Presentation on Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” from Simulacra and Simulation -- Rebecca
Week 2
Monday -- Author or Machine?
Discussion of Remainder, Chapters 7-10
Presentation on online interviews with Tom McCarthy -- Alex B
Thursday – Mediated selfhood
Discussion of Remainder, Chapters 11-end
Presentation on Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter -- Chloe
Week 3
Monday –Mechanical Memories
Discussion of Remainder , Chapters 11-end
Presentation Justus Nieman, “Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism,” Modern Fiction Studies 58:3, Fall 2012, 571-598.
Thursday – Final Class
Discussion of Remainder (and Augustine, Dickinson)
Presentation Bernard Steigler, “Memory” -- Nadeine