Modernity and the Crisis of Representation

This course will not focus narrowly on the history of literary criticism, but rather will offer glimpses, in part through the lenses of competing interpretations, of the landscape which gave rise to national, vernacular cultures in Europe, and hence to the institutions of modern literary scholarship and criticism—in short, the intellectual world of which we are products and members. Though it will deliberately eschew a single genealogical account of modernity in the West, the course will follow a chronological trajectory from the disintegration of the so-called medieval "model" or "culture of the sign" to the development of an Enlightenment "philosophy of the sign" and its troubled legacy of dualism. To the extent that I have a story to tell in this course, it might be titled "Subjectivism and its discontents"; but there will be other stories too, told by poets and philosophers ranging from Dante to Kant, and by current (or recent) theorists and historians such as Blumenberg, Foucault, and Habermas.
A course reader will be available in Sept. at the Ave Copy Shop, 4141 University Way.
Written assignments will include a conference-length paper and some exercises to be determined in consultation will class participants.
Note: the first class will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 30.