MPhil in Culture and Criticism Dr David Hillman, The Body in Culture Michaelmas Term

Transcription

1 MPhil in Culture and Criticism Dr David Hillman, The Body in Culture Michaelmas Term This course combines historical and theoretical perspectives on the place of the body in culture, from early modernity through to modernist conceptions of embodiment. The classes will examine specific literary and philosophical texts, including Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Mary Shelley, and Joyce, alongside theorists of the body, including Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. Some questions we will explore include: Is the body a form of knowledge? What part does the body play in the construction of self and other? What makes bodies such compelling objects of desire or repulsion? How is the immediate materiality of the body represented in literary texts? How, conversely, can the body itself be 'written' - marked and changed by ideological and socio-historical forces? What, ultimately, can we say about the enigmatic relation between the body and language? This course selects some salient writers and thinkers whose relation to embodiment opens up a variety of avenues of interrogation of these questions. It is not conceived of as in any way exhaustive of the topic, nor does it attempt to put across an established theory. The hope is that it will act as an introduction to a set of issues circulating around the backbone of embodiment and its theorization; as a provocation to engage with a topic that has become increasingly significant over recent years in a variety of critical disciplines. The course assumes that you are able to devote between six and eight hours of reading time to prepare for each class. The specified reading for each class is made up of core reading texts that will form the centre of class discussion each week and secondary readings, which will offer in-depth critical material on the primary texts and/or suggest further lines of enquiry ways of opening out broader questions emerging from the week s main texts. The secondary reading is not compulsory, but to get the most out of the course you will need to explore at least some of this material. Most of the texts are readily available in the various Cambridge libraries, but PDFs of the core reading will be posted on CamTools or ed to participants. Each week I will ask one of the group to pre-circulate (by ) a response to a core text, and will also ask for presentations in class on material from the secondary list. I will not be providing a list of essay topics for those wishing to write coursework essays for this seminar. I would prefer you to propose your own essay topics, and to consult me before beginning to write. Essays may employ whatever materials and theories you choose, but should bear a clear relation to the themes central to the course. My address is: dah54@cam.ac.uk

2 Week 1: What is a Body? Topics and questions we will explore include: Is the body a form of knowledge? What kinds of knowledge can the body provide? Epistemologies of and from the body; subjectivity, objectivity and the body; bodies and/as cultural artifacts; can the body be written (and how are texts bodily)? - Michel de Montaigne, 'Of Experience' in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, vol. 3 essay 12 (we'll be using both the Frame and the Florio translations; either is fine, or any other good translation for that matter) - Paul Valéry, 'Some Simple Reflections on the Body', in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989) - Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body [1934], in (e.g.) Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Carey and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Introduction and pp Jean Starobinski, The Body s Moment, in Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1985) - Herbert Lüthy, Montaigne, or the Art of Being Truthful, in Michel de Montaigne, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), Robert D. Cottrell, Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne s Essais (Columbus: Ohio, 1981) - Elaine Scarry, (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), Introduction. - Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) - Shigehisha Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002), Preface (7-14) & Chapter Three ( Muscularity and Identity, ) Week 2: Insides Topics and questions we will explore include: Does the body have a history? Epistemic shifts; nostalgia and embodiment; vulnerability, power and ideology; ; the social body; selfhood and inwardness; inside and outside. -Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford or Arden my preferred editions) -Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, chapter 1 ( The body of the condemned ), trans.

3 Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), Selections - Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980) - Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process Vol. I, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) - Alphonso Lingis, The Subjectification of the Body, in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), Jean Starobinski, The Inside and the Outside, The Hudson Review, vol. 28 no. 3 (Autumn 1975), Peter Stallybrass, Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Introduction. - Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Introduction - David Hillman. Shakespeare s Entrails: Belief, scepticism and the interior of the body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chapter 3 (81-116) Week 3: Philosophical Bodies Topics and questions we will explore include: How do bodies think? Physics and metaphysics; bodies and machines; did the Enlightenment change the body? Secularisation, commodification, textualisation of bodies. - René Descartes, The Meditations and the Discourse on Method (preferably the 1996 Cambridge UP edition, ed. John Cottingham) - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selections from Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962); also available in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),

4 - Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Introduction - Drew Leader, A Tale of two Bodies: The Cartesian Corpse and the Lived Body, in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: 1998), Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) - William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2008), Introduction - Daniel Cottom, Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2001) (Introduction + Chapter Three) - Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) (Part Four) - Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (New York: Norton, 2004) - Londa Schiebinger, Nature s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) - Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, eds., Thinking Bodies (Stanford University Press, 1994) - Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990) - G.S. Rousseau, Introduction: Toward a Natural History of Mind and Body, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G.S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) Week 4: Bodies in Parts Topics and questions we will explore include: bodily disintegration and reintegration; part-whole relations; the (dis)ordered and the disabled body; What makes a body grotesque? The uncanny; monstrosity and humanity; Can there be a mechanical (inorganic) monster? -Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus -Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) -Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XVII:219-56

5 - Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) - Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) - Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) - Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Alan Richardson, Romanticism and the Body, Literature Compass 1 (2004), Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) - Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992) - Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) - Georges Canguilhem, Monstrosity and the Monstrous, Chapter 25 in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (NY: Routledge, 2005), Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1997) - Christopher Forth and Ivan Crozier, eds., Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) - Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) - Deborah A. Harter, Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment(Stanford University Press, 1996) - David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997) Week 5: Outsides Topics and questions we will explore include: skin and self; surface and depth; the modernist body; bodies in consumer culture; language and the body; psychoanalysis and the body; jouissance, sexuality and the body. -James Joyce, from Ulysses: The Lotus-Eaters and Penelope (preferably the Oxford edition [1998], ed. Jeri Johnson) -Maud Ellmann, Skinscapes in Lotus-Eaters, in Ulysses En-gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (University of South Carolina, 1999), 51-66

6 - D.W. Winnicott, Transitional objects and Transitional Phenomena (1951) & The Location of Cultural Experience, both in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971) - Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3-20 & Claudia Benthien, Skin: on the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) - Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) - Christine Froula, Modernism s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) - Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) - Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) - Lindsey Tucker, Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's "Ulysses" (Ohio State University Press, 1986) - Derek Attridge, Literature as Deviation: Syntax, Style, and the Body in Ulysses in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) - Richard Brown, ed., Joyce, Penelope and the Body (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) Week 6: Touching Bodies Topics and questions we will explore might include: Presence and absence; bodies and texts; bodies and identities; bodies, biology and technology; body ethics; tact and touch. Core Reading (provisional): - John Keats, This Living Hand, in (e.g.) The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3 rd edn. (London: Penguin, 1988), Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Part I - Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, in The Birth to Presence, trans Brian Holmes and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), J. Hillis Miller, Touching Derrida Touching Nancy: The Main Traits of Derrida s Hand, Derrida Today 1 (2008),

7 - Jean-Luc Nancy, opening remarks in On Touching: Sense and Mitsein, lecture at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe, ( accessed 12 August 2014) - Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004) - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), and A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Selections ( How to Become the Body Without Organs) - Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca & London: Cornell university Press, 2004), Introduction (1-23) (& optionally Chapter Five: The Sealing of the Heart, ) - Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) - Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: The University of Illinois Press, 2012) - Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh, 2013) - Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001) - Gilles Deleuze, Ethology: Spinoza and Us, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992) - Friedrich Nietzsche, Selections from The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) - Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) - Kristen Brown, Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-dualism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006) DAH August 2014