Reading & Composition

In everyday life, we seem to know an object when we see it, perhaps less when we hear it, but our senses don’t usually have a tendency to fool us, and far less often do they baffle us. In contrast, it happens quite often in literature that a clear and reliable relationship between sensation and perception does not exist. This course focuses on literary works after 1600 where the senses are not what they seem, where the interpretation of sensation through perception is radically different than what it might be in reality. Indeed literature might often be considered as a world where sensations become strange and perception somewhat astounding, or even terrifying. We will therefore look at how the relationship between the human senses and perception takes a radically different form in literature and the effect that this has on our understanding of these human faculties. What is the value of a literary world where the senses are not what they seem or where they seem to create altogether new objects? Here we might also consider themes like madness and magic, as well as philosophical terms like sense-data. In exploring these pressing literary issues, a large amount of analytical writing will be performed in this course. We will learn how to perform sophisticated close-readings of the assigned texts while examining the literary techniques that authors use in the exploration of the human senses. We will then learn how to interpret specific passages and form original arguments on the basis of our close-readings.

Required texts:

Aristotle, The Poetics

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (this text will be read in selections)

Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

James Joyce, Ulysses (this text will be read in selections)

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur