ENGL 244-01. Critical Theory: "Finding Theories of Laughter, Passion, Recollection and Forgetting in Great Fiction”
Professor Robert Barsky
Wednesdays FM226, 12-3; office hours Monday 2-3, Tuesday Thursday 10-11 FM219
Course description: 'Theory' doesn’t seem critical to most people, unless they can be turned on to the exciting work that is being done on the carnivalesque, the mind/brain relation, the origins of human language, and why it is that we can be so turned on, or upset, or inspired, or shocked, by the stories that are told in literature. In this course we shall read great works of fiction in English that move us to reflect upon the really basic questions about reading, writing, and telling stories, and along the way we’ll be inspired by powerful words to laugh, to cry, to dream and to wonder why fiction is the gateway to the magic of abstract exploration of our minds, and the possible worlds they can create.
Books:
Paul Auster, New York Stories
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
David Lodge, Thinks
Michel Meyer, Philosophy and the Passions
Vladimir Nabokov's, Lolita
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Assignments:
Four short (6-10 pages) assignments, due September 24th, October 22nd, November 19th, and December 10th
Grading:
Each written assignment is worth 20%
Participation and one oral presentation 20%
Week-by-week
August 27th introduction
September 3rd: Paul Auster and Structuralism
This trilogy and his many works since then (including "In the Country of Last Words," "Leviathan," "Mr. Vertigo," "Moon Palace," and others) have been translated into numerous languages and have brought him further world attention. Auster's trilogy broke ground in its mix of serious fictional techniques and detective and mystery genres. Geoffrey O'Brien of "The Village Voice "wrote: ""The New York Trilogy "are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to -inhabit it. . . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have -initiated a whole new round of storytelling." This new edition will delight readers and collectors of Auster's work.
September 10th: NO CLASS
September 17th: Auster and scientific approaches to literature
September 24th: Angela Carter and the carnivalesque
"Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy tale horror, and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In Nights at the Circus, she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous, Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety."
October 1: Carter, Bakhtin and the messiness of being human
October 8: Charles Dickens and Marxism
“The One Thing Needful”
Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders -- nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was -- all helped the emphasis.
"In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!"
October 15th: Dickens and social reform
October 22nd: Passion and Literature, from Meyer to Nabokov
October 29th: Vladimir Nabokov and the literature/law movement
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
November 5th: Nabokov and passion/reason relations
November 12th: Jeannette Winterson and Feminist Thought
Evoking modern physics and antique metaphysics, Winterson's ambitiously eccentric narrative challenges her readers to rupture the boundaries of conventional perceptions and linear experience of time. Her narrative voices, alternating between a Rabelaisian giantess and her foundling son, collapse at times into one another and the characters plunge vertiginously through time and space. On the one hand reworking fairy tales, and on the other evoking the filth, squalor and exuberant bawdiness of 17th-century England in the throes of civil war, Winterson ( The Passion ) eventually locates her characters in present-day London. Graced with striking similes and poetic cadences, the author's prose is clean and strong, and the disjunctive elements of her narrative are integrated elegantly. But the novel's freakish characters and flights of surreal fancy are insufficient to redeem its overwrought artifice. The work is further limited by its stridently dogmatic feminism, which, contemptuously belittling all men as arrogantly stupid bullies who are vastly women's inferiors in maturity and moral fiber, vitiates its ostensible intent to transcend the narrowness of human perception.
November 19th: Winterson, feminist work and new fiction
November 26th: thanksgiving!
December 3rd: David Lodge and Cognitive Sciences
Lodge has a fondness for penning novels in which the lives of his central characters are comically juxtaposed, either geographically (Changing Places, Small World) or professionally (Nice Work), and in this latest outing he pits literature against science. Newly widowed Helen Reed has accepted a post as writer-in-residence at the University of Gloucester, one of England's recently converted polytechnical institutes, where she finds herself drawn to Ralph Messenger, director of the school's Center for Cognitive Science and one of its leading lights. And although the attraction is mutual, they diverge markedly in their views on adultery. Ralph has long enjoyed a quasi-open marriage to an American wife who turns a blind eye to his philandering, as long as he doesn't embarrass her in public, while Helen is still mourning her faithful husband, Martin. Through Helen's diaries and Ralph's voice transmissions, the reader is taken inside their conscious minds as they explore their feelings for each other, as if, as Helen herself observes, they could see inside a cartoon bubble over their heads reading, "Thinks.-"
December 10th: supplementary class on “Howl!”
