Prof. Laura QuinneyEng220
Rabb 131T 2-4:50
olding 103
Office hrs: T 12:30-1:30, F 10-11 and by appt.
POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY
Syllabus:
T1/16Introduction
T1/23The Ancient Quarrel: Plato and the Poets
Plato, Ion and Republic 376e-398b, 595-608b
Murdoch, from TheFire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,
Jessica Moss, “What is Imitative Poetry and Why is it Bad?”
Alexander Nehamas, "Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10”
Badiou, “Poetry and Thought,” from Plato’s Republic
T1/30Plato and the Poets, cont.
Nietzsche, from The Genealogy of Morals
Badiou, “What Is a Poem Or, Philosophy and Poetry at the Point of the Unnameable,” “The Age of the Poets,”“What Does the Poem Think?”
Elizabeth Asmis, “Plato on Poetic Creativity”
David K. O’Connor, “Rewriting the Poets in Plato’s Characters”
T2/6Aristotle, Poetics(Online: Project Gutenberg)
Kenneth Burke, “On Catharsis, or Resolution”
T2/13Poetry and Truth
Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” (Online: Project Gutenberg)
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
Dorter, “Conceptual Truth and Aesthetic Truth”
Agamben, “The End of the Poem”
Angela Leighton, “Poetry’s Knowing: So What Do We Know?”
Winter Break
T2/27Figuration
Longinus, On the Sublime(Online: Project Gutenberg)
Jacobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”
Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty”
Paul deMan, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” and “Shelley Disfigured”
Shelley, The Triumph of Life
T3/6German Romantic Poetics
Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”
Anonymous, “Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism”
F.W. Schlegel, selections fromfragments,“Dialogue on Poesy,” and “On Incomprehensibility”
A.W. Schlegel, “Theory of Art”
Michel and Oksiloff, “Romantic Crossovers: Philosophy as Art and Art as Philosophy”
T3/13German Romantic Poetics, cont.
Novalis, “Aphorisms and Fragments,” “The Universal Brouillon”
Holderlin, “On the Process of the Poetic Mind” and “Being Judgement Possibility”
Holderlin, selected poems
Charles Larmore, “Holderlin and Novalis”
T3/20Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute
T3/27Heidegger,
“The Thinker as Poet”
“What Are Poets For?”
“On the Origin of the Work of Art,”
“Poetically Man Dwells,”
“Three Lectures on Poetry”
Badiou, “The Philosophical Status of the Poem after Heidegger”
Spring Break
T4/10Blanchot
“Rilke and Death’s Demand,”
“Two Versions of the Imaginary”
“The Gaze of Orpheus”
Rilke, selected poems
T4/17Metaphor
Reimer and Camp, “Metaphor”
Richard Moran, “Metaphor”
Monroe Beardsley, “Metaphor” and “The Metaphorical Twist”
Max Black, “Metaphor” and “How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson”
Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean”
Dickinson, selected poems
T4/24Metaphor, cont.
Freud, selection from The Interpretation of Dreams
Jacobson, “Two Types of Aphasia”
Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics” and “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling”
Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor”
Mark Johnson, “Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor”
Course Requirements:
Each student will present one oral report, write one short paper based on the report, and write a term paper of 20-30 pages.
The Brandeis administration requires me to add these statements:
Learning Objectives
To familiarize students with some of the most important ideas about the interrelations of poetry and philosophy in the western critical tradition; to show how the application of those ideas can inform and deepen the interpretation and understanding of individual poems and poets; to afford students a critical vocabulary for writing about poetry and philosophy; to provide students with a vocabulary and a set of approaches for teaching the topic of literature and philosophy in a university setting.
Credit Hours
Success in this course requires ninehoursof work for every threehoursof in class time.