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

Freud S The ego and the id (supplied)
Haar M Nietzsche and metaphysics tr. and ed. M Gendre SUNY Press, 1996
Patton P (ed.) Deleuze: A critical reader Blackwell, 1996
Lacan J The seminar of Jacques Lacan book II: The ego in Freud's theory etc. 1954-1955 ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli, Norton, 1991
Merleau-Ponty M Phenomenology of perception tr. C Smith Routledge, 1994
Merleau-Ponty M `Cezanne's doubt' in Sense and non-sense (supplied)
Sophocles The three plays: Antigone. Oedipus the King. Oedipus at Colonus Penguin