COMP 301
Sublime Confusion: A Survey of Literary and Critical Theory
Spring 2017
Division I
This is not the current course catalog
Class Details
Which is more appealing, a roller coaster or a rose? For much of its history, art and literary theory has conceived itself as a science devoted to explaining and defining “beauty.” But running alongside this is an edgier countercurrent that worships something else: an experience of excitement, fear, suspense, or thrilling confusion often described as “the sublime.” The sublime interested early critics, from classical rhetoricians to the German Idealists, as a way to make aesthetics more scientific paradoxically by identifying the doorway through which art and literature escaped the realm of reason. More recently the notion of literature’s exciting confusion has played a key role in modern critical theory from Russian formalism to new criticism, deconstruction, postmodernism, and posthumanism. (In fact, poststructuralist criticism itself has a thrillingly confusing quality that we will not ignore.) We will take up a cross section of critical theory from classical times to the present, focusing on careful reading of relatively short texts by Plato, Aristotle, Addison, Burke, Schiller, Nietzsche, Shklovsky, I.A. Richards, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Haraway, and others. Case studies ranging from opera to Xbox will enlighten, thrill, and confound you. Written assignments will encourage you to parse these theories carefully and apply them to the literary texts that most interest you: prose, poetry, or drama from any time and place; film, visual art, or architecture; music, new media, or digital media, and beyond.
The Class:
Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 9
Class#: 3065
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Limit: 15
Expected: 9
Class#: 3065
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation:
active class participation, several short response, a polished oral presentation, and a final 15-page paper
Extra Info:
may not be taken on a pass/fail basis
Prerequisites:
200- or 300-level course in literature, theory, or philosophy, or permission of the instructor
Enrollment Preferences:
students majoring or considering a major in a related field
Distributions:
Division I
Class Grid
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COMP 301 - 01 (S) SEM Literary Theory & The Sublime
COMP 301 - 01 (S) SEM Literary Theory & The SublimeDivision ICancelled3065
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