BA Comparative Literature (COM6213)

European Philosophy

&

The Representation of Consciousness

in Modern Literature

Tutor: Dr Peter Latham

European Philosophy and the Representation of Consciousness in Modern Literature

Note: students will not be expected to read most of the secondary texts listed here, as many of these will be incorporated as part of lectures/seminars. The primary texts consist of: two very short monologic plays, two short novels, the first part of a novella, and three short stories. In addition to these texts, students will read extracts from two novels and handouts/worksheets with short extracts from secondary texts as preparation for seminars. Copies of lecture notes will also be provided at the end of each week’s class.

Week 1

Historical contexts:

Narrative modes for literary representations of consciousness

Modernist, postmodernist and earlier literary techniques for ‘capturing’ consciousness: free direct thought (interior monologue), direct thought, free indirect thought (narrated monologue), reported thought (psycho narration) (handout/worksheet)

Modernism and the novel of consciousness

Modernist criticism of ‘Naïve Realism’/privileging of interiority over exteriority and imposition of artificial plot

Thematic concern with fragmentation of self/the unreliable narrator/unreliability of memory (handout/worksheet)

e.g. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) (free direct thought/interior monologue), William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) (free direct thought/interior monologue), Jean Rhys, Quartet (1928) (free indirect thought/narrated monologue)

Postmodernism and the novel of self-consciousness

Postmodernist highlighting of authorial consciousness/‘intrusion’ of author to underscore literary artifice Thematic concern with solipsism + foregrounding of language itself as problematic/solipsistic Inclusion of numerous sources of narrative (in)coherence, none of which is definitively meaningful or truthful (handout/worksheet) e.g. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985), David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996) (Wallace’s novel is also considered to be an example of ‘post-postmodernism’) References Alter, R. Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975) Cohn, D. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) Lodge, D. Working with Structuralism, Essays and reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Ark, 1982 ) (chapters 1 & 5) Palmer, A. Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) Sotirova, V. Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Waugh, P. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London, Methuen, 1984)

Weeks 2-4: European Literature

European philosophy and literary representations of consciousness: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the limits of consciousness in early European modern(ist) literature (handout) Week 2

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “Consciousness is a sickness”

Notes From Underground, 1864: “As if Kierkegaard had stepped right out of Dostoevsky’s pen” (handout/worksheet) + Part One of Notes From Underground (handout)

References

Dolack, T. ‘Consciousness, Ethics and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’, ASEBL Journal, Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014 Harper, R. The Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins Press, 1965) Katsafanas, P. ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization’, European Journal of Philosophy, 2005, 13:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–31 Kaufman, W. Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, 1956 (New York: Plume, 2004) Kierkegaard, S. The Concept of Dread, 1844 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) Kierkegaard, S. The Sickness unto Death, 1849 (London: Penguin Books, 2004) Kierkegaard, S. The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Direct Communication, Report to History, 1859 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) Kierkegaard, S. Papers and Journals: A Selection (London: Penguin Books, 1996) Ludi, M. ‘(Anti-)Hero? Anxiety, Distress and Paradox in the Notes from Underground’, Living Dwelling Thinking, 7th February 2006 Nehamas, A. ‘How One Becomes What One Is’, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 385-417 Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science, 1887 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) Shmueli, A. Kierkegaard and Consciousness (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971)

Week 3

Knut Hamsun’s ‘psychological novel’ and the unconscious

Hunger, 1890: “Thought in its innermost concealed corners, its darkest, most remote paths” (handout/worksheet) + extracts from Hunger (handout)

References

Anderson, P.T. ‘Fractional Feelings in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger’, Idunn, 1st December 2016 Hamsun. K. ‘From the Unconscious Life of the Mind’, 1890 (Louisville, Kentucky: White Fields Press, 1994) Kittang, A. ‘Knut Hamsun's Sult: Psychological Deep Structures and Metapoetic Plot’, Facets of European Modernism (ed) Janet Garton (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1985), pp. 295-308 Lavrin, J. Aspects of Modernism: From Wilde to Pirandello (London: Stanley Nott, 1935) McFarlane, J.W. ‘The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun’s Early Novels’, PMLA, Modern Language Association, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Sep. 1956), pp. 563-594 Rees, D. Hunger and Modern Writing: Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright (Köln: Modern Academic Publishing, 2016)

Wientzen, T. ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation’s Global Frame’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 48.2, 2015 Yuchen HE, C. ‘The Reality of Narrating Hunger’, The Oxonian Review, 1 February, 2016, Issue 30.1

Week 4

Hjalmar Söderberg’s “cosmic despair, reflective inwardness and fatalism”

Dr Glas, 1905: “Thought is an acid, eating us away” (handout/worksheet)

References

Ahlin, L. ‘The doctor and the pastor: on love and evil in Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas and Bengt Ohlsson’s Gregorious’, Forum for World Literature, August 1, 2012 Atwood, M. Introduction to Doctor Glas (London: The Harvill Press, 2002) Eagleton, T. ‘Doctor Glas: haunting reflections’, The Lancet, Vol. 360, Issue 9350, 21st December, 2002 Merrill, R. ‘Ethical Murder and Doctor Glas’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4: ‘Literature and Ideas’ (Summer, 1979), pp. 47-59 Söderberg, H. Doctor Glas, 1905 (London: The Harvill Press, 2002)

Weeks 5-9: British Literature

European philosophy and literary representations of consciousness: Consciousness and memory in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and late modernist Beckettian literature (handout) Week 5

Samuel Beckett: The last modernist?

Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Consciousness and memory: “Be, again, be again” (handout/worksheet)

Not I (1972) ‘The inner scream’: “Something begging in the brain” (handout/worksheet)

References

Anderson, D. ‘Krapp’s Last Tape and Mapping Modern Memory’, in Weiss, K. The Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Methuen, 2012) Beckett, S. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986 (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) Cohn, D. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) Fletcher, B. and Fletcher, J. A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1985) Gordon, L. ‘Krapp’s Last Tape: A New Reading’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1990, pp 97-110 McDonald, R. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) McMillan, D. ‘Human Reality and Dramatic Method: Catastrophe, Not I and the Unpublished Plays’, in Acheson, J. and Arthur, K. (eds) Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company (London: The Macmillan Press, 1987) Malkin, J.R. ‘Matters of Memory in Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1997, pp 25-39

Worth, K. ‘Past into Future: Krapp’s Last Tape to Breath’, in Acheson, J. and Arthur, K. (eds) Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company (London: The Macmillan Press, 1987) Week 6

B.S. Johnson: ‘Telling stories is telling lies’ (1)

Randomness, the aleatory and memory in The Unfortunates (1969) (handout/worksheet)

References

Jenner, S. ‘B.S. Johnson and the Aleatoric Novel’, in Jordan, J. and Ryle, M. (eds) B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant Garde (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Johnson, B.S. The Unfortunates, 1969 (London: Picador, 1999) Jordan, J. ‘“For recuperation”: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates’, Textual Practice, 2014, Vol. 28, No.5, 745-761 Lea, D. ‘Narrative Wreckage: Cancer and the Unfortunate Body in B.S. Johnson’, English Studies 96 (6), pp. 785-798 Mitchell, K. ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading’, in Tew, P. and White, G. (eds) Re-reading B.S. Johnson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Week 7

Reading Week Week 8

B.S. Johnson: ‘Telling stories is telling lies’ (2)

Consciousness, memory and solipsism in The Unfortunates (1969) (handout/worksheet)

References

Buchanan, G. ‘“Like loose leaves in the wind”: Effacement and Characterisation in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1’, in Jordan, J. and Ryle, M. (eds) B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant Garde (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Johnson, B.S. The Unfortunates, 1969 (London: Picador, 1999) Jordan, J. ‘“For recuperation”: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates’, Textual Practice, 2014, Vol. 28, No.5, 745-761 Mitchell, K. ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading’, in Tew, P. and White, G. (eds) Re-reading B.S. Johnson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Sheehan, M. ‘A Man Taking Pictures of a Man Taking Pictures: Theory of Mind, the Novel, and B.S. Johnson’s Subjective Objective’, The Quarterly Conversation, September 6, 2011 Week 9

James Kelman: Beckettian interiority and (anti)realism

The internal monologue in ‘Not Not While the Giro’ (1983): ‘None of that pye-in-the-sky metaphysics here if you don’t mind’ (handout/worksheet) + ‘Not Not While the Giro’ (handout)

References

Hunter, A. ‘Kelman and the Short Story’, in Hames, S. (ed) The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) Kelman, ‘“And the judges said…’, in “And the Judges Said”, 2002 (London, 2003: Vintage) Kelman, ‘A Look at Franz Kafka’s Three Novels’, in “And the Judges Said”, 2002 (London, 2003: Vintage) McKibbin, T. ‘James Kelman: Owning the Language’, 2007, https://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/james-kelman Shanks, P. ‘Early Kelman’, in Hames, S. (ed) The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) Weeks 10 – 11: American Literature

European philosophy and literary representations of consciousness: Consciousness and solipsism in Sartean existentialism and postmodernist American literature (handout) Week 10 The Culture of Narcissism: “The voyage to the interior discloses nothing but a blank”

Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974): “The consolations of unreachable inwardness” (handout/worksheet)

Lydia Davis’s ‘Break it Down’ (1986): ‘No turning, no end-point, no release’ (handout/worksheet) + ‘Break it Down’ (handout)

References

Alexander, K. ‘Breaking It Down: Analysis in the Stories of Lydia Davis’, in Burton Harrington, E. (ed) Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form: Approaches by American and British Women Writers (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2008) Boddy, K. The American Short Story since 1950, 2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2011) Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’,1974 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985) Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981) Camus, Albert. The Rebel, 1951 (London: Penguin Books, 1971) Cohen, J. ‘Reflexive incomprehension: on Lydia Davis’, Textual Practice, 24:3, 501-516, December 2009 Davis, L. ‘Break It Down’, 1986, in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2009) Goodyear, D. ‘Long Story Short: Lydia Davis’s radical fiction’, The New Yorker, March 17, 2014 Issue Heller, J. Something Happened, 1974 (London: Vintage Books, 1995) Kaufman, Walter, ed. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, 1956 (New York: Plume, 2004) Knight, C. and Davis, L. ‘An Interview with Lydia Davis’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 525-551 LeClair, T. ‘Joseph Heller, Something Happened and the Art of Excess’ in Nagel, J. (ed). Critical Essays on Joseph Heller (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall and Co., 1984) Lee, S. A Body of Individuals (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009) Sale, R.B. ‘An Interview in New York with Joseph Heller’, 1970, in Sorkin, A.J. (ed.) Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1993)

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943 (Bristol: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1984) Seed, D. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain (London: Macmillan Press, 1989) Webber, Jonathan. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Routledge, 2009) Wider, Kathleen V. The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) Winther, P. ‘Joseph Heller on Something Happened: An Interview’, American Studies in Scandinavia, 8 (No.1, 1976), 17-31 Week 11

David Foster Wallace: ‘Consciousness is nature’s nightmare’

‘Consciousness is nature’s nightmare’: ‘Good Old Neon’ (2004) - ‘Not another word’ (handout/worksheet) + ‘Good Old Neon’ (handout)

References

Ballantyne, N. and Tosi, J. ‘David Foster Wallace on the Good Life’ in Cahn, S.M. and Eckert, M. (eds), Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) Bloom, R. ‘The Best of David Foster Wallace’, The American Prospect, November 26th, 2012 Accessed 31/08/18 from: http://prospect.org/article/best-david-foster-wallace

Boswell, M. ‘"The constant monologue inside your head": Oblivion and The Nightmare of Consciousness’ in Boswell, M. and Burn, S. J. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Burn, S. J. (ed) Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Oxford, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2012) Carlisle, G. Nature's Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace's Oblivion (Los Angeles: Slideshow Media Group, 2013) Casero, E.E. ‘Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness in American Fiction, 1980-2010’ (2016). PhD Thesis Theses and Dissertations--English. 38. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/38 den Dulk, A. Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Egger and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015) Hayes-Brady, C. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) Miller, L. ‘The Horror, the Horror’, Review of Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, Salon, 30th June 2004, accessed 24/08/18 from: https://www.salon.com/2004/06/30/wallace_8/ Nixon, C.R. ‘The Work of David Foster Wallace and post-postmodernism’, 2013, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Leeds) Rando, D.P. ‘David Foster Wallace and Lovelessness’, Twentieth-Century Literature 59.4, Winter 2013 Thompson, L. Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) Urban, T. ‘Liberating Irony: Investigating Postmodern Techniques in David Foster Wallace’s Short Fiction’ (2016), BSU Theses and Projects Week 12

Tutorials on essay plans The module assessment consists of one 500-word essay plan (10%), and one 3500-word essay (90%).