Postgraduate Course: The Literary Absolute (ENLI11037)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | English Literature |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | This course aims to extend students' knowledge of the growth of the idea of the literary aesthetic and its relations to philosophy, and in particular to questions of truth and value. After an introduction to eighteenth and nineteenth-century constructions of mimesis, imagination and the aesthetic as "literary absolute," the course turns to the implications of the epistemic and moral disengagement of the aesthetic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The course then charts how through developing interest in notions of the unconscious, experience, expression, the sublime and power, the aesthetic is drawn into an attack upon the notion of truth. Finally, two weeks will be spent considering the location of the literary aesthetic within the context of a culture which has largely collapsed the meaning/truth distinction traditionally nurtured by philosophy, and which is disposed to view the aesthetic as a type of ideology rather than a value. Correspondingly, in the light of the review of the aesthetic's relation (both synchronic and diachronic) to truth, the central theoretical question will concern the possibility of the recovery of a sphere of autonomous literary value.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | Essential course texts |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
| This aims to extend students' knowledge of the growth of the idea of the literary aesthetic and its relations to philosophy, and in particular to questions of truth and value. |
Assessment Information
| One coursework essay 4,000 words. |
Special Arrangements
| PG Version |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
Week 1: The Literary Absolute
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ¿Preface: The Literary Absolute,¿ The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 1¿17; Friedrich Schlegel, extracts (handout)
Week 2: Representation
Plato; Aristotle, Poetics; Samuel Johnson, from Preface to Shakespeare
Week 3: Imagination and the Aesthetic
Immanuel Kant; Friedrich von Schiller; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Percy Bysshe Shelley
Week 4: Aestheticism
Walter Pater; Oscar Wilde, ¿The Decay of Lying¿ (handout); Leo Tolstoy, ¿What is Art?¿ (handout)
Week 5: The Unconscious
Sigmund Freud; Jacques Lacan
Week 6: Experience and Expression
Martin Heidegger; Benedetto Croce, from Aesthetic (handout)
Week 7: Realism and Formalism
Georg Lukacs, ¿Realism in the Balance¿ (handout); Theodor Adorno, ¿Reconciliation Under Duress¿ (handout)
Week 8: The Sublime
Longinus; Edmund Burke; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (handout); Jean-François Lyotard (handout)
Week 9: Power
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (handout); Harold Bloom; Michel Foucault, from ¿Truth and Power¿
Week 10: Dialectic and Metaphor
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Jacques Derrida
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| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Core text:
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (Norton, 2001).
Secondary Reading:
Gary Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (St Martin's P, 1999)
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester, 1990)
Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (1991)
David Carroll, Paraesthetics, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (1987)
David Cooper, A Companion to Aesthetics (1992)
Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1988)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, History-Doctrine, rev. ed. (1964)
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd. ed. (1988)
E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967)
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 1978, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (1988)
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (1994)
Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990)
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| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | TLA |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Tim Milnes
Tel: (0131 6)50 3615
Email: tim.milnes@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Natalie Carthy
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Natalie.Carthy@ed.ac.uk |
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