Representation: Mind, word and image

Transcription

1 CORE 101 SYMBOLS AND CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS FALL 2010 Professor Edwin McCann, School of Philosophy T. A. Brian Blackwell Lecture TTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. THH D Dis F 9:00-9:50 a.m. THH D Dis F 10:00-10:50 a.m. THH D Lab W 05:00-8:00 p.m. THH R Representation: Mind, word and image Course epigram: The human body is the best picture of the human soul. Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment 25. [ Die menschliche Körper ist das beste Bild der Menschlichen Seele. ] We live in a world of meanings: we manufacture many different things that have meanings, such as poems, paintings, novels, films, road signs, trail markers, TV commercials, physical theories, and so on, endlessly. These are complex artifacts the meanings of which are embedded in a rich variety of systems of interpretation, implicit and explicit. Some of these things function as representations of other things, some evoke thought or elicit emotion directly. In all of this the central agent is the human mind; meanings wouldn't exist without it. The central question of the course is: how does the mind make, and respond to, meanings? How are complex considerations about medium, narrative convention, genre, and allusion (intertextuality) involved in the construction of meaning of a given literary (in the broadest sense) artifact? How do we use various representational strategies to think about the nature of human beings and the human condition? We'll address this question in the first part of the course by looking at Shakespeare's play Hamlet (and in addition, some of that play's sources), and tracing the relations between it and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, also considering along the way Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, which is an important reference point and inspiration for Stoppard's play. We'll be comparing both print and film versions of these works, and will consider as well basic questions about performance of these works (on stage, on film, and in one's imagination as one reads the text). We'll pay particular attention, in this regard, to the 'play within the play' structure in both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and in addition to the selfreflexiveness concerning theater in all three of the plays. In the second part of the course we'll look at transformations--metamorphoses--of the human as ways of exploring the truth of the human condition. We'll begin with selections from Ovid's poem The Metamorphoses, in which the idea of physical transformation is used to express the meaning and nature of love, moral transgression, and our place in the world. Building on Ovid but infusing his own fertile imagination, Dante Alighieri puts the idea of

2 transformation into a Christian worldview. Flashing forward into modernity, we'll look at Franz Kafka's classic story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), which explores the transformation of an ordinary man into a gigantic insect as a physical manifestation of his spiritual poverty. Switching genres, we'll then lighten things up, looking at two satirical pieces in which a human body part stands in for the human being itself (in Gogol's The Nose a man's nose takes over for him in living his life, and in Roth's The Breast a man is turned into that part of the body). We'll close off this part of the course by considering some of the variations on the human that have captured the popular imagination, including werewolves and zombies (human beings transformed), androids (humanoids manufactured by humans endowed with machine consciousness), manufactured monsters cobbled together out of human corpses (Frankenstein's monster). In Part three we ll focus in on one particularly popular breed of transformed human beings: vampires. A number of central themes and concerns come together in the notion of a vampire: immortality; predation and parasitism; exoticism; and of course, sex. We'll begin with Bram Stoker's seminal gothic novel Dracula, interesting in its own right because of its epistolary or documentary narrative structure. We ll then see how a whole spate of vampire films, from Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens; Herzog's 1979 remake, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht; and others, both refer back to Stoker s novel and connect with current concerns in popular culture. The fourth part of the course addresses the question of the nature of representation and meaning as a question in philosophy. We will begin by studying a classic work of seventeenth century philosophy, Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, and will analyze his complex arguments against skepticism and in favor of the new science. We proceed on to the twentieth century philosophers preoccupation with language, carefully analyzing two very influential works by one of the most important twentieth century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which revolutionized the philosophical world when it was published in 1921, he presented the 'picture theory of meaning' for language, and his equally revolutionary second book, Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in the 1950s, in which he argued against his own earlier theory, and against much of the philosophical tradition as well, including Descartes. We'll come out of this section of the course with an appreciation of the complexities of the relations between mind, meaning, language, knowledge, and the world. I can't promise that we'll settle the large questions, but we'll at least be clearer about what they are. Required Book List 1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy : With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Tr. and ed. Cottingham. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge U.P. ISBN Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. Pears & McGuinness. Routledge. ISBN

3 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Ed. Hacker & Schulte. Wiley- Blackwell. ISBN-13: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Grove Press. ISBN William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Hoy. 2nd Edition. W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Grove Press. ISBN Dante, Inferno ed. Mazzotta, tr. Palma. Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton and Co. pb W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN Bram Stoker, Dracula. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Auerbach & Skal. W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN Ovid, The Metamorphoses tr. Melville. Oxford World s Classics. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Oxford World s Classics. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: Nikolai Gogol, The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories tr. Ronald Wilks. Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: Philip Roth, The Breast. Vintage. ISBN-13: Course requirements 1. Regular attendance and participation in lectures, screenings, lab, and discussions. Counts for 15% of the course grade. 2. Six unannounced in-class quizzes on the reading and/or film viewing due on that day; the average of the four best quiz grades will count for 15% of the course grade. 3. Four short papers. At the beginning of each part of the course I will hand out a list of topics, one for each week of that part. You can then choose which week or which topic you ll do your paper on, allowing you to structure your workload so that it fits with your other classes and commitments and to give you the choice of topics which interest you. There are two options for papers. The first, known as the Regular Option, is three 3 page papers, one from each of the first three parts of the course, and one 4-5 page paper on a topic from the fourth part of the course. The second, the Philosophy Option, has you writing two 3 page papers on any two of the first three parts of the course, and two 4-5 page papers on part four of the course, one on Descartes and one on Wittgenstein. On the Regular Option, each 3 page paper counts for 10%, and the 4-5 page paper for 20%. On the Philosophy Option, each 3 page paper counts for 10% and each 4-5 page paper counts for 15%. Taken together, the papers count for 50% of the course grade. 4. One in-class final exam, two essays from a list distributed in advance. Counts for 20% of course grade. Schedule of Lectures and Readings Tu Aug 24 Introduction and overview

4 Part one: Ghosts, Dreams, Madness, and Blood: The Play's the Thing Th Aug 26 Hamlet as poetry, as play, and as text for interpretation. Reading: William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in Hoy, pp Tu Aug 31 Hamlet and plays within plays. Reading: William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in Hoy, pp (again); Saxo Grammaticus, Amleth, and F. de Belleforest, The Hystorie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke in Hoy, pp Th Sep 2 Hamlet on film. Viewing: Hamlet, Laurence Olivier (dir.), 1948 (Laurence Olivier as Hamlet); Hamlet, Michael Almereyda (dir.), 2000 (modernized version with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet); Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh (dir.), 1996 (Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet); Hamlet, Franco Zeffirelli (dir.), 1990 (Mel Gibson as Hamlet); Hamlet, Rodney Bennett (dir.), 1980 (BBC version, Derek Jacobi as Hamlet); Gamlet, Grigory Kozintsev (dir.), 1963 (Innokenti Smoktunovsky as Hamlet); Hamlet, Gregory Doran (dir.), 2009 (David Tennant as Hamlet). Tu Sep 7 Living in a universe (and a play) without meaning. Reading: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Th Sep 9 Trapped in a play: Beckett meets Shakespeare via Stoppard. Reading: Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard (dir.), Part two: Metamorphoses: The Human Body as Image of the Human Soul Tu Sep 14 Changes in the cosmos, gods changing humans. Reading: Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, ll (Melville, pp. 1-23); Book II, ll (Melville, pp ); Book III (Melville, pp ); Book IV (Melville, pp ); Book V, ll (Melville, pp ); Book VI, ll (Melville, pp ); Book VII, ll (Melville, pp ). Th Sep 16 Misdirected love and its transformative effects. Reading: Book VIII, ll (Melville, pp ); Book IX, ll (Melville, pp ); Book X (Melville, pp ); Book XI, ll (Melville, pp ); Book XIV, ll (Melville, pp ); Book XV, ll (Melville, pp ). Tu Sep 21 Human disfigurement through the abandonment of reason. Reading: Dante, Inferno I-XVII pp

5 Th Sep 23 Human disfigurement through the misuse and abuse of reason. Reading: Dante, Inferno XVIII-XXXIV, pp Tu Sep 28 Human as insect. Reading: Kafka Metamorphosis, in Ritchie Robertson (ed.) and Joyce Crick (tr.); The Fly David Cronenberg (dir.), 1986 [remake of The Fly, Kurt Neumann (dir.), 1958]. Th Sep 30 Human, part and whole. Reading: Gogol, The Nose, in Wilks pp ; Roth, The Breast. Tu Oct 5 Body-snatching: from Cold War politics to New Age psychobabble. Viewing: Invasion of the Body Snatchers Don Siegel (dir.), 1956; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman (dir.), 1978 Part three: Metamorphosis, Sex, and Blood: Vampires Th Oct 7 Gothic nightmares with a Victorian twist. Reading: Bram Stoker, Dracula, chaps (Auerbach & Skal, pp ). Tu Oct 12 Waking from the nightmare? Reading: Bram Stoker, Dracula, chaps (Auerbach & Skal, pp ); "Dracula's Ghost" in Auerbach & Skal pp Th Oct 14 Nightmares screened and remade. Viewing: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, F. W. Murnau (dir.), 1922; Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Werner Herzog (dir.), 1979; Shadow of the Vampire, E. Elias Merhige (dir.) 2000; Dracula, Tod Browning (dir.), 1931; Drácula, George Melford (dir.), 1931; Bram Stoker's Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola (dir.), 1992; Horror of Dracula, Terence Fisher (dir.), 1958; Love at First Bite, Stan Dragoti (dir.), 1979; Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Guy Maddin (dir.), 2002; Buffy the Vampire Slayer [TV series], and of course, Twilight (books and movies ). Part four: How Mind Connects to the World: Ideas and Language Tu Oct 19 Skepticism and a new foundation for science.

6 Reading: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Dedicatory Letter, Preface to the Reader, Synopsis, Meditation I, and Objections and Replies to First Meditation (Cottingham, pp and 63-7). Th Oct 21 The cogito and mind and body as substances. Reading: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy Meditation II and Objections and Replies to Second Meditation (Cottingham, pp and 68-77). Tu Oct 26 ( ) Ideas, reality, and God. Reading: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy Meditation III and Objections and Replies to Third Meditation (Cottingham, pp and 78-89). Th Oct 28 Freedom, error, God again, and the defeat of skepticism. Reading: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy Meditations IV, V, and VI, and Objections and Replies to Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Meditations (Cottingham, pp and ). Tu Nov 2 Language and the structure of the world. Reading: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (i.e, the 1s and 2s). Th Nov 4 The picture theory of meaning. Reading: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (i.e. the 3s and 4s). Tu Nov 9 Logic in Language, and metaphysical consequences. Reading: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the 5s). Th Nov 11 The senselessness of logic; silence. Reading: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6-7. (i.e, the 6s and 7). Tu Nov 16 Wittgenstein s attack on the Tractatus I: language-games, simple objects, and logical structure. Reading: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Th Nov 18 Wittgenstein s attack on the Tractatus II: logic, the subliming of language, and the role of philosophy. Reading: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Tu Nov 23 Wittgenstein on following a rule. Reading: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Th Nov 25 Thanksgiving recess University holiday no class.

7 Tu Nov 30 Wittgenstein on the impossibility of private language. Reading: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Th Dec 2 Wittgenstein on the I and the visual room. Reading: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Tu Dec 14, 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.: final examination.