RUS2410

Literature and phenomenology: De Sade, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy

S M Vladiv-Glover

8 points - First semester - 3 hours per week - Clayton

Objectives On successful completion of the course students should have a basic understanding of the philosophical concept of phenomenology and be able to apply its categories, such as 'appearance', 'experience', 'the gaze', 'the decentred subject', 'heterogeneity' etc., in an analysis of nineteenth-century European literary discourse. This analysis will also have to demonstrate the student's knowledge of the prescribed classics through a close-to-the-text reading.

Synopsis The subject will examine four seminal authors, whose works have transformed European aesthetics and European literature in a fundamental way: De Sade, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Tolstoy. The introduction of a new 'sensibility' encompassing the perverse and the ugly by De Sade and Dostoevsky, and the pursuit of a 'revelationist' aesthetics by Nietzsche and Tolstoy through poetic and novelistic prose, set European literature on the path of a phenomenological quest, which laid the foundations for European modernism/postmodernism. The investigation (through the thought of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalysis) into the phenomenological aesthetics of the set authors will lead to a revision of the concept of literary 'realism'.

Assessment Seminar paper (1500 words): 25% - Essay (3000 words): 45% - End-of-semester test (90 minutes): 30%

Prescribed texts

Dostoevsky F M The brothers Karamazov Penguin
De Sade M The 120 days of Sodom and other writings Arrow Books, 1990
Nietzsche F Human all too human: A book for free spirits tr. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann, U Nebraska P, 1966
Tolstoy L Anna Karenina Penguin
Tolstoy L What is art? Penguin
Benjamin W 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin - essays and reflections ed. Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968

Recommended texts

Merleau-Ponty M Phenomenology of perception tr. C Smith Routledge, 1994

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