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Spring 2002
This information effective
for Spring 2002.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Spring 2002
Instructor: Helene Moglen
TTh 12:00–1:45 p.m., Kresge
327
W 7:00–10:00 p.m., Kresge
321
In this course, we examine ways in which the gothic imagination constructs nightmare versions of bourgeois society, revealing cultural anxieties about the family, sexuality, religion, science, and the self, as well as gender, class, and racial identities. Texts will include theoretical essays (Freud's "The Ego and the Id," and Lacan's "The Mirror Stage"), fictions (The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Heart of Darkness, Maus I and II, and Beloved), and films (Blue Velvet, Alien, Sweetie, Apocalypse Now). Two shorter papers and one longer final essay will be required.
Spring
2002
Instructor: R. Terdiman
TTh 2:00–3:45 p.m.
Kresge 325
This course will consider (in English translation) a series of works by French authors who form a tradition of “philosophical” writing in France. We will read Montaigne (Essays); Rousseau (Confessions); Diderot (Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream); and Sade (Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine). These writers raised the “big questions” about life and love, freedom and servitude, knowledge and action, individuals and society. They and their questions continue to influence our thought and writing today. The course will be combined lecture and discussion. There will be a combination of papers and examinations. Taught in English, readings in English.
Spring
2002
Instructor: Chris
Coffman
M 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Stevenson 221
coffman@cats.ucsc.edu
http://people.ucsc.edu/~coffman
Course Description:
What was understood as “madness” at the beginning of the twentieth century? What, if any, are the affinities between madness and what we now think of as “modernist” literature? What is the function of the madman or the madwoman in early twentieth-century literature and culture?
Moreover, to what extent did early twentieth-century quasi-medical discourses such as sexology and psychoanalysis relate madness to gender and sexuality? And while many scholars have held up the female hysteric as the paradigmatic figure from whom Freud derived a revolutionary theory of modern subjectivity, what are we to make of early twentieth-century texts that focus on the crises of psychotics (both male and female) as prototypical of the modern condition?
To approach these questions, we will begin by reading quasi-medical narratives of several types of “madness:” selections from Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion; Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of the hysterical “Dora” and the psychotic German Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber; the young Jacques Lacan’s brief discussion of the murderous Papin sisters. Keeping those texts’ divergent constructions of madness in mind, we will examine a series of early twentieth-century novels that inscribe what could be construed as “madness” (Franz Kafka’s The Trial; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; André Breton’s Nadja; H.D.’s HERmione; Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness; Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), as well as letters and memoirs from writers who were confined to insane asylums (Antonin Artaud and Leonora Carrington). Ancillary readings will likely include excerpts from Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness; Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism; Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany; and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady.
While this course will focus on links between modernism and madness, we will place our discussion in the larger context of recently revitalized debates over the definition of “Modernist” textuality and canonicity. We will read some novels that are cited as quintessential examples of textually experimental “high modernism” (Mrs. Dalloway, Nightwood, The Sound and the Fury), while also examining an early twentieth-century realist novel (The Well of Loneliness) and writings by surrealists (Breton, Carrington, to a certain extent Artaud).
In addition to being of particular interest to students who intend to concentrate on modernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, or queer studies, this course would appeal to anyone interested in exploring the broader questions it raises. What is “literature,” and is it distinct from the writings of the mad? That is: as Michel Foucault claims, is the literary work by definition not madness?
Requirements:
All students will write a seminar paper, due at the end of the quarter, either on an assigned text or on another early twentieth-century text. A 3–4 page prospectus of the final paper will be due at the beginning of Week 8.