Meeting One: What do we do? Assignments: DeQuincey, Barthes, Mink
Plan of Course
Kinds of Understanding (Mink)
Theoretical
Categoreal
Colligational
Worlds to Consider:
Social Structures
Natural World
Conceptual World: Arts and Sciences, Human and Otherwise
Tools (and see Barthes)
Description
Interpretation
Ordering
Evaluation
Metacriticism
"Professional Conferences" (imaginary, but then what is real?)
Life Studies: "power" and "knowledge" in works
portraying human lives, human history, human societies, human institutions:
Meeting 7 (Feb. 20)
Natural Impressions: "power" and "knowledge" in
works portraying the "natural" world (the world of physical and
biological/zoological/botantical phenomena not entirely controlled by human
actions) and/or works of art in relation to the natural world: Meeting
11 (Mar. 27)
Maps, Diagrams, and Paradigms: "power" and "knowledge"
in works portraying analytical schema porporting to describe and/or explain
something about the phenomenal or noumenal world(s):Meeting 14 (April 17)
GENERAL TOPICS for particular meetings
1-9 Introduction
1-16 Biography : Johnson, Life of Richard Savage; Boswell,
Life of Johnson; Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson; Hopkins,
"Felix Randall," Yeats, "In Memory of Major Robert
Gregory"; Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
1-23 History: Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;
Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why; Keats, "On First Looking
into Chapman's Homer"
1-30 Travel and Journalism
2-6 Autobiography
2-13 Diaries and Letters, Meditations and Prayers
2-20 CONFERENCE
2-27 Natural History
3-6 Case Histories (anthropology, archaeology, sociology, religion,
politics)