ENG6077, Section 6750

Professor Phillip Wegner

Wednesday 6-8 (12:50-3:50 p.m.)

Turlington 4112

Office: Turlington 4012C (Graduate Coordinators Office)

<> Turlington 4115
Office Hours: by appointment

Phone: 392-6650, ex. 231; ex. 261

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm

In this course, we will take up the question of the representation of the "fleeting beauty" of what the influential contemporary French thinker Alain Badiou names an Event. In particular, our focus will be on a rich and diverse range of literary and cultural texts, some contemporary and others more recent, that struggle to represent what occurred in four political uprisings that take place over roughly a sixty year period in the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century: John Brown's 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry; the 1871 Paris Commune; the Russian Revolution of 1905; and the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. What all these events share is the fact that they were failures, their participants captured, violently condemned by the authorities as terrorists, and executed or forced into exile. Yet, despite this fact, these short lived "lightning flashes" all hold a particular fascination for a diverse range of artists and intellectuals. In his recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou opens with a Preamble entitled, "What Is Called Failure?" wherein he observes, "The thought of failure emerges at the point when a politics appears before the court of History, and when it sees itself there." Among its numerous valences, Badiou raises here a fundamental question concerning the representation of history. In another recent essay, Fredric Jameson similarly highlights the insufficiencies of the strategies of classical realism—whose fundamental requirement he suggests is "a conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as such"—to engage with these kinds of events. As a result, such lightning flashes call forth a fundamental rethinking of how we represent the past, and a wholesale invention of new narrative forms. In our seminar, we will look at the instructive failures and partial successes of some of these efforts, mining them for the lessons they have for our own efforts to grapple with the representation of a past and present in the midst of its own dramatic changes.

Readings

Students will be responsible for procuring copies of all the readily available readings for the semester. Harder to find, out-of-print, and shorter texts will be made available 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. 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 to produce: 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 another other work –be it 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 PhD 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 spring term; work turned in after that time should not expect to receive extensive comments.