ENG 6077, Section 6750
LITERARY THEORY: FORMS
The Persistence of the Dialectic
Professor Phillip Wegner
Monday 6-8 (12:50-3:50 p.m.)
Turlington 4112
Office: Turlington 4115
Office Hours: Wednesday, 1-3 p.m.;and by appointment
Phone: 392-6650. ex. 261
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm
This course will explore the productive engagements with and reinventions of the tradition of Hegelian dialectical theory and practice in three of the most important literary and cultural theorists operating today: Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek. Bruce Robbins, in a review essay on the occasion of the reprinting of Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), argues that one of the inaugural gestures of the rich and diverse body of thought known as post-structuralism is the displacement of Hegel’s “master-slave” dialectic by Friedrich Nietzsche’s revision of this founding narrative in his landmark work, On the Genealogy of Morals. Butler’s thought, Robbins then suggests, marks its distinction from most post-structuralist influenced theory in its commitment, albeit in a critical fashion, to Hegel’s dialectic and the politics of emancipation that arise from it. In this course, we will attempt to test the validity of this claim, and see to what degree it also applies to Jameson’s and Zizek’s equally rich and influential critical programs. We will begin our discussion with an examination of a short text by Hegel: the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit (in a recent new translation by Yirmiyahu Yovel). We will then turn our attention to landmark works by two of the most influential dialectical thinkers of the middle part of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit) and the German scholar, Theodor Adorno (Hegel: Three Studies). With this framework in hand, we will then look at early re-imaginings of the dialectical tradition and method by our three thinkers: Jameson’s Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971); Butler’s Subjects of Desire; and Zizek’s Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993). Finally, we will explore the persistence of these commitments in later work of these three thinkers.
Texts
Dennis King Keenan, Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy
GWF Hegel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, translation and running commentary by Yirmiyahu Yovel
Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
Slavoj Zizek, Violence
All of these texts are available at Goerings Book Store Campus Location (1717 NW 1st Avenue, next door to Bageland; 372-3975; goerings@bellsouth.net). Other readings will be made available, at various spaces and places, as the semester progresses.
Aims and Methods
1. Full presence in every spatial, ontological, existential, and intellectual sense of the word, as well as active and engaged participation in the seminar discussions. Given your presence here, I assume that all of you are looking forward as much as I am to having the opportunity for a serious and careful engagement with these texts. Thus, the most general expectation that I have for this semester is that all of you intend to read these works, and to do so in a responsible and rigorous fashion, and in a spirit of good faith and intellectual camaraderie. I would ask then that you make every effort to engage in, to use a much abused term, a dialogue with these works, being attentive to their respective voices, acknowledging their particular historical and otherwise contingent beings in the world, and finally working to imagine how we today might best retool the insights and modes of analysis of their various “unfinished projects.” In this way, I hope that we will develop a much more complex and profitable understanding of both the power and originality of these arguments and traditions.
2. In order to facilitate and enrich our discussion of these works, I want to ask each of you to be responsible for introducing and situating each week’s readings. As I imagine all of our work fundamentally to be a collective project, you will do this in groups of three, with each group being responsible for the readings on two different occasions. Each group will be asked both to provide a brief introduction to the material and to serve as general “experts” on the readings for that week. Your group can take a variety of approaches to this task: you may want to highlight some of the central issues the readings address; briefly outline their main arguments; note the ways they engage with what has come before; place them in historical, intellectual, and political contexts; note connections to other models and practices; give overviews of some of the secondary readings on these works; offer some questions for discussion; and so forth. I only ask that you keep the opening comments brief (15 minutes maximum total) so that we can begin our general discussion as soon as possible. I also hope that your groups will continue to work together throughout the semester, sharing ideas, giving support, discussing research projects, drinking beer, and other important tasks. I will be very happy to meet with your group beforehand to suggest some secondary readings and discuss approaches and tactics.
3. The Eleventh Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group will be held the weekend of March 26-28, with a keynote address by Michael Hardt. As there will be a great deal of discussion relevant to our class, I ask that all enrolled students plan to attend some of the sessions and events.
4. For the major written component of the course, I will ask each of you to develop an independent research program, which will take one of two forms: either a) two shorter essays of 10-15 pages in length examining the questions or issues raised by the material in more depth, or drawing connections between these works and other areas of interest; or, b) a major critical research project of some 25-30 pages in length. The aim of the longer project will be one of the following: 1) a sustained engagement with some of the works we discuss in class; 2) a further independent examination of the issues raised by the work we have looked at; 3) a discussion drawing upon some of the recommended secondary or additional readings; or 4) an original reading of some other texts of interest –be they literary, theoretical, filmic, architectural, cultural, or otherwise— deploying the concepts and models we elaborate during the course of the semester. I would also like to ask that all Ph.D students plan to pursue option b, with the goal of producing an essay that will serve either as the basis of a dissertation chapter or a publishable essay (or even both). I ask each of you who choose this second option to turn in a detailed paper proposal, complete with bibliography, about a month before the paper is due. If you require additional time to work on this project, I am happy to allow you to do so. However, in order to avoid extending the course indefinitely, I expect that the project will be completed by the end of the summer terms; work turned in after that time should not expect to receive extensive comments.
Tentative Discussion Schedule
1. January 12 – Introduction: Dialectical and Hegelian Thought Today
Readings: Dennis King Keenan, Preface to Hegel and Contemporary
Continental Philosophy
Fredric Jameson, “Persistencies of the Dialectic: Three Sites”
Bruce Robbins, “Dive In!”
2. January 19 – MLK Day: NO CLASS
