Ger 391 / Lit 391 Ideology and Imagination
Poets are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.
P.B. Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (1821)
This class explores the relationship between literature and politics. We will begin by looking at late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of the imagination. We will then examine the ways in which theories of creativity and mental productivity shape Marxist accounts of labor and ideology. Throughout the semester, we will consider why literary and political discourses raise such similar questions about the nature of language.
The conference will be conducted in English. There will be three 5-page papers. Students taking the course for German credit will meet in several extra sessions to discuss German-language works in the original.
The following books may be purchased in the bookstore:
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works
Bertolt Brecht, Baal, A Mans a Man, and The Elephant Calf
Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Best Tales of Hoffmann
Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O and Other Stories
Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings.
With the exception of the Baudelaire text, these books are all on 24-hour reserve in the library.
Students taking the class for German credit should also purchase:
Deutsche Gedichte: Eine Anthologie (ed. Dietrich Bode)
Karl Marx, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
Friedrich von Schlegel, Kritische und theoretische Schriften.
The following materials are available as e-reserves on the library website:
Theodor Adorno. Cultural Criticism and Society. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. 17-34.
Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (third version). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 251-283.
Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism and the Market. In Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 1994. 278-295.
Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Pages 43-60. 119-140.
Readings for September 20, October 23 and 25, November 15, and November 20 will be available as handouts.
Ger 391 / Lit 391
Daily Schedule
8/28 Introduction
8/30 Immanuel Kant: selections from Critique of Judgment
9/4 LABOR DAY
9/6 Heinrich von Kleist: The Earthquake in Chile
9/11 The Earthquake in Chile
9/13 E. T. A. Hoffmann: The Sandman
9/18 The Sandman
9/20 J. W. von Goethe: Prometheus; Annette von Droste-Hlshoff: In the Grass
9/25 Edgar Allan Poe: The Man of the Crowd; Charles Baudelaire: Crowds
9/27 Poe: The Philosophy of Composition, The Raven
1st Paper due Friday, September 29 at 5PM
10/2 Baudelaire: The Mask, Hymn to Beauty, The Double Room
10/4 Baudelaire: On the Essence of Laughter
10/9 Karl Marx: The German Ideology
10/11 The German Ideology
Fall Break
10/23 Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
10/25 On Truth and Lie
10/30 Sigmund Freud: From the History of an Infantile Neurosis
11/1 From the History of an Infantile Neurosis
2nd Paper due Monday, November 6 at 5PM
11/6 Bertolt Brecht: A Mans a Man
11/8 Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
11/13 The Work of Art
11/15 Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo, Black Cat, Death
11/20 Gottfried Benn: Morgue Cycle
11/22 Theodor Adorno: Cultural Criticism and Society
11/27 Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
11/29 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
12/4 Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism and the Market
3rd Paper due Monday, December 11 at 5PM