DISCOURSE, DESIRE AND REPRESENTATION

This course will situate various important concerns of modern critical theory in the perspective of Classical and Medieval culture (from Plato to the rise of Humanism), whose literary, philosophical and rhetorical writings have endured as a conceptual foundation for later movements of “literature,” “intepretation,” and “criticism” up to our time.

What are the relationships between signs, images and consciousness? How do language and discourse relate to the dynamics of the human mind and the social systems of a culture? How does the production of written texts at once express and displace human desire—what René Girard calls the “desire to desire?” What are the claims for the power of human speech to “represent” or “intepret” non-being, absence, or death-- much less, to assert the “truth” of unreal, imagined, or eternal things? What is individual “subjectivity,” and what is a literary “character”?

Readings will include selected writings from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John of Damascus, Dante and Du Bellay.

Emphasis during class meetings will be placed on the discussion of primary texts, but in their written students will be asked to assess the relevance of some important later thinker or critic—for instance, Schiller, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Freud, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Girard or Eco.

Grades in the course will be based on: participation (20%), the oral presentation of a paper topic (15%), and a final written essay (max. 20 pp.), due one week after the final session (65%).