Seminar on Literary Theory

 

Spanish 505B Literary Theory

Third Module

A Theory of the impossible in literature or the impossibility of theory in literature

All literature can be read as a paradoxical relationship between the impossible (what cannot be done, accepted, or understood) and the possible: writing. We will try to capture the reality of a double fall of literatures (into the impossible and into the possible). We will think about literature as a relation between death and writing, built upon an impossibility. A relation will be drawn between the presence of the canon and the absence of impossible literatures. From then on we will consider the relation impossible/failure and the dialectics between potentiality and act, attempting to stress poetic potentiality over its effective realization. Finally, attention will be paid to impossible literatures as a remembrance of the barbarity that sustains every possible literature.

Readings:

Class 1: Introduction to the topic. What does it mean to think about impossibilities? Differences between impossible books and impossible literatures. Death: Home of the impossible literatures, of music, of the end of the subject, of ruins, of violence, of night, of absence, of ideal types, of tragedy, of elegy. Awakening (Writings).

Class 2: Loss: remnants, shards, lacks, footsteps, scars, testimonies. The concept of impossibility. Impossibilities of realization. Unfinished or fragmented books. Unwritten being written books. The tradition of silence. Abandonments, destructions. Utopias.

1) Felman, Shoshana. “Writing and Madness or Why This Book?” in Writing and Madness.

2) Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text” in Image-Music-Text

3) Adorno, Theodor. “Feasibility and Accident; Modernity and Quality – ‘Second Reflection’”; “The New, Utopia and Negativity”; “Modern Art and Industrial Production”; “Aesthetic Rationality and Criticism”; “The experience of nature is historically deformed”; “Aesthetic Apperception is Analytical”; “Natural Beauty as Suspended History”; “Determinate Indeterminateness”; “Nature as a cipher of the reconciled”; “Hegel’s Critique of Natural Beauty: Its Metacritique”; “The Nonexistent”; “Semblance, Meaning, and ‘Tour de Force’”; “Expression and Mimesis”; “Enigmaticalness and Understanding; Methexis in Darkness” in Aesthetic Theory

4) Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference (selections)

5) Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library”; “The Storyteller”; “Some reflections on Kafka”; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations

Class 3: Impossibility of acceptance. Autonegation. Writings against art and literature. Antinovels. Social resistances. Impossibility of understanding. Illegibles. The mystic tradition. The presence of the canon and the impossible literatures. Dead literatures and authors. Philosophically dead literatures. Socially dead literatures. Literary dead literatures.

6) Frye, Northorp “The Archetypes of Literature”

7) Bataille, Georges. “Meditation and Inner Experience” (selections from Inner

8) Nietzsche, F. “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” (selections).

Experience); “The Impossible” (selections from The Impossible).

9) Derrida, Jacques. “The End of the book and the Beginning of Writing” in Of Grammatology.

10) Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of Disaster (selections).

Class 4: Relation impossible/failure. Potency and act. Literature as a paradoxical relation between two spheres. Fall and birth, to be or not to be. Dreams.

11) Laub, Dori. “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival” in Laub, Dori and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history.

12) Derrida, Jacques. “Hors Livre: Outwork Hors D’Oeuvre Extratext Foreplay Bookend Facing Prefacing” in Dissemination.

13) Man, Paul de. “Criticism and Crisis” in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism.

Blanchot, Maurice. “Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration” in The Space of Literature.

Reference:

Richter, David H. The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts And Contemporary Trends.

Bedford Books, Boston, 1998.

Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Blackwell Reference, Cambridge, 1991.

Caruth, Cathy Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative and history

Deleuze, Gilles Critical and Clinical

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx

Foucault, Michel Madness and Civilization