ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day.

Topic for 2024/25b: Special Topic: The Five Senses: Revisiting Literary Theory. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” – Joseph Conrad. By making us see, Conrad did not mean making us understand, but rather, see as such: revive our embodied vision as though he were giving us new eyes. Like other materialist (and anti-Platonic) artists and thinkers before and since, Conrad sought to re-ground apprehension in the human organism. But how is this achieved by reading, an activity that habitually transmutes the sensible into the intelligible? Amidst a media ecology of perpetually circulating and augmented sensation (what Paul B. Preciado calls our “pharmacopornographic era”), how can literature, of all things, restore us to our senses?

Following the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences, we will revisit Lit Theory under the heading of the five senses. Some provisional topics and texts: 1. Sight: the sensible and the intelligible: Plato vs. Aristotle on mimesis; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine; Walter Benjamin on the optical unconscious; Jonathan Crary on scopic regimes. 2. Hearing: noise, rhythm, phonotextuality: Garret Stewart, Reading Voices; Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other;Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone”; Henri Meschonnic, The Critique of Rhythm. 3. Taste: judgment, value, abjection: Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions; Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror; Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. 4. Olfaction: alterity and the archive: Hsuan Hsu on Atmo-Orientalism; Sissel Tolaas and Caro Verbeek on archiving smells. 5. Touch: skin, muscles, viscera: Burke and Kant on the beautiful and the sublime; Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of touch; Michel Serres, “Voiles.” Heesok Chang.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS