Postgraduate Course: The Literary Absolute (ENLI11037)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | 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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| Course description |
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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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 |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2017/18, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 15 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
196 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
One coursework essay 4,000 words. |
| Feedback |
The formative assessment exercise requires students to submit an essay plan and indicative bibliography (approx. 1000 words) four weeks before the submission of their summative assessment exercise. Formative feedback is given to students at least one week in advance of their summative assessment exercise for the course. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate knowledge of and critical engagement with some of the central topics and themes in Romantic literature and critical theory.
- demonstrate an understanding of the relationships between these themes and the history, philosophy and culture of the periods studied.
- demonstrate knowledge of selected debates and concepts in the history of philosophy and critical theory.
- theory. demonstrate the ability to deploy a variety of methodological approaches to the study of literature.
- demonstrate the ability to reflect constructively on the development of their own learning and research practice.
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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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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
PG Version |
| Keywords | TLA |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Tim Milnes
Tel: (0131 6)50 3615
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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