Important dates 2012-13 autumn term monday 1 October

Christiania Whitehead, BA, DPhil (Oxon) – Associate Professor

This MA module is designed to allow for an exploration of the importance of the concept of experience in relation to both aesthetics and modernity.  In exploring this, we will cover a number of areas of inquiry. These will include explorations across a number of interlocking themes: a) the ways in which the formation of ‘taste’ in aesthetics is related to political and cultural ideas of modernity; b) how taste and judgement relate to the category of experience; how experience relates to the formulation of laws and norms; d) the role of experience in learning and thus also in formal institutions of literary and other educations; the relation of experience to the University as an institution of modernity; the formulation of the cultural norms of modernity through aesthetic experience; the question of how we might attempt to give legitimisations to judgements; the issue of justice. We will engage with these issues through consideration of some literary texts, considered alongside some philosophical arguments.     

This is a graduate level module. Accordingly, its actual shape will be partly determined by the evolving research interests of the student cohort. We will begin with issues of experience in relation to modernity in Montaigne and Descartes. This will probably take the first two weeks of the seminar. The actual schedule following this will be by agreement.

Montaigne, 'De l'expérience'

Moliére, Le bourgeois gentilhomme

Giambattista Vico, selection from Rectorial Orations in the Universitá di Napoli

Swift, A Tale of a Tub

Schiller, Selections from Letters on Aesthetic Education

Eliot, selections from Selected Essays

Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'

 

Aesthetics and Modernity II – Prof. Thomas Docherty (term 2)

This MA module is designed to allow for an exploration of the importance of the question of violence, broadly construed, in relation to the cultural formation of modernity. We will begin from a collocation of issues related to what we can term ‘intellectual violence’ and its hypothetical inscription in ideas of Enlightenment, alongside more direct questions of material violence as determinant of a struggle over what might constitute modernity. The question then devolves onto issues regarding the emergence of the body as a site for politics and especially for potential political violence; and this allows for an investigation of matters related to corporeal aesthetics, beauty and violence, and the ritualised body as a site for sacrifice, confession and witnessing. The emergent bio-political questions can then be related directly to versions of history that are thought to be constitutive of modernity itself; and we can thus explore the question concerning violence (usually occluded) in the formation of a modern aesthetics.

 This is a graduate level module. Accordingly, its actual shape will be partly determined by the evolving research interests of the student cohort. We will begin in the first week or two with a consideration of some key questions from Adorno & Horkheimer, and we will simultaneously try to historicise those questions by looking at Voltaire. After that, sessions will be conducted by mutual agreement.

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Voltaire, Candide

Marx, The German ideology; Eighteenth Brumaire

Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' and other selected essays

Beckett, The Unnamable

Agamben, Homo Sacer; Language and Death

Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader

Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy; Conditions

Arendt, On violence; On revolution; and selected essays

Derrida, 'Circonfession'

Edward Bond, Plays Three (Methuen)

Caryl Churchill, The Skriker (Nick Hern Books)

Jim Cartwright, Road (Samuel French)

Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life (Faber)

Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (Methuen)

Sarah Kane, Cleansed (Methuen)

Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman (Faber)

Connor McPherson, The Weir (Nick Hern)

Patrick Marber, Don Juan in Soho (Faber)

Harold Pinter, Plays: Volume Four (Faber)

Simon Stephens, Motortown (Methuen)

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (Faber)

Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good (Methuen)

In the first session we read W. G. Sebald’s account of Conrad’s response to the Congo, in Chapter V of The Rings of Saturn. A familiarity with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will be an advantage.

This session looks at encounters with the Ottoman Empire, the Near East and India in travel writings by Alexander Kinglake (from Eothen), Robert Byron (from The Road to Oxiana) and J. R. Ackerley (from Hindoo Holiday). Extracts from these texts will be made available in photocopy.

In this session we focus on the relationship between travel across and between historical and geographical frames, using Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, a travelogue-cum-memoir set in Egypt.

Turning to that most difficult of borders to cross, the border that separates us from the past, we read extracts from the first volume of Elias Canetti’s autobiography, The Tongue Set Free. Extracts will be made available in photocopy.

In our final session we return to W. G. Sebald, and read one of his great narratives concerning the unknowability of the past: the fourth section, ‘Max Ferber’, of The Emigrants.

As indicated above.

The submission must consist of the following:

a portfolio of narrative fiction or non-fiction of between 5,000 and 6,000 words plus a critical commentary on the cultural and creative processes involved in the portfolio.

BACKGROUND READING

S. H. Duncan, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, 1999