Reading & Composition

Literary figures and conceits of style have often been perceived as threatening to language’s “proper uses,” e.g. its capacities to name, to mean, and to communicate. But how do we decide which aspects of a text are ornamental, and which parts functional? What separates the ornamental and instrumental uses of language? This course will pose the question by stretching the metaphor of the written ornament to match its use in each of our texts. We will begin by looking for the efficiency, productivity, and utility of apparently decorative uses of language, but we will follow this trajectory through to consider discourses that locate their value or potential in the absence of purpose. We will be especially concerned with the political consequences of activating literature for particular ends. Although our priority is to study these matters in relation to literary and rhetorical traditions, we will also consider comic books, television, architecture, cinema, visual art and new media.

Readings will be chosen from among the following:

Plato, selections from The Republic

Erasmus, selections from On Copia

Rabelais, selections from Gargantua and from the Quart Livre

Clément Marot, selections from L’Adolescence clémentine

Robert Herrick, selections from Hesperides

Blake, The Book of Urizen

Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy”

Marx, selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and from Capital

Weber, selections from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Pater, selections from The Renaissance

James, “The Figure in the Carpet”

Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest” or The Picture of Dorian Gray

Beckett, Mercier and Camier

Austin, selections from How to Do Things With Words

Barthes, selections from Mythologies “The World of Wrestling,” Ornamental Cookery,” “The New Citroën,” “Plastic”

Edward Gorey, The Curious Sofa, The Willowdale Handcar, or The Object-Lesson

Ponge, selections from Le Parti pris des choses

Barbara Johnson, “Is Writerliness Conservative?” “Strange Fits”

Pierre Alferi, selections from Oxo

Cole Swensen, selections from Goest

Wong Kar-Wai, In the Mood for Love