Analytic Aesthetics

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This gives you a thorough grounding in certain central areas of aesthetics, approached from an analytic perspective, and fosters independent critical thinking about issues raised in these areas. Issues covered may include: the objectivity or otherwise of aesthetic judgement; the relation between the aesthetic properties of an object and its descriptive properties; what sort of thing an artwork is; definitions of art, both pre- and post-Wittgenstein; the relation between art and emotional expression; the relation between aesthetic and ethical value; the value of tragedy. Along the way, you will explore works both by major historical figures, and by important recent thinkers in contemporary analytic aesthetics.

Derrida

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module provides an introduction to the work of Jacques Derrida. This entails an engagement with a range of fields and discourses, including philosophy, politics, ethics, psychoanalysis, film and, above all perhaps, literature. Each seminar considers a particular topic or aspect of Derrida's work. In each session we will focus in depth on a specific text by or about Derrida plus, where appropriate, other texts (literary and non-literary).

Explorations in Philosophy and Literature

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

The study of the relation between philosophy and literature offers a unique opportunity to explore new perspectives on literary aesthetics and criticism, to examine disciplinary boundaries and traditions, and finally to address both the philosophy of literature and literary treatments of philosophy. By encouraging rigorous and in-depth engagement with a variety of perspectives and a range of authors, the module provides you with an environment for stimulating dialogue between philosophy and literature.

The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module explores the origins, development and impact of the ideas of some of the major theorists of the Frankfurt School. The module begins by looking both at the early ideas of the Frankfurt School in 1930's that were influenced by Marx, and then proceeds to address the various ways in which the Frankfurt School theorists attempt to integrate various other aspects of thought in response to historical developments.

We will focus on texts by Benjamin, Habermas, Horkheimer, Kircheimer, Marcuse, Neumann and Adorno, but also look at the theorists that most influenced them such as Hegel, Marx and Lukcs. We will also look at certain key themes in Frankfurt School criticism such as, 'dialectic', 'negative dialectics', 'determinate negation', 'critique', 'immanent critique', 'positivism', 'instrumental reason' and 'Enlightenment'

Kant

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Kant's metaphysics has shaped all later philosophy, in both the analytic and the continental traditions. His moral philosophy is of crucial importance to contemporary ethics, and to political philosophy from Hegel and Marx to Rawls. His aesthetic theory still has a continuing influence in all work in that field. The course will provide you with an advanced introduction to his work, concentrating on one or more of the central texts.

Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module will explore the terms modernism and postmodernism, and the relationship between the two, by reading a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form, subjectivity, and modernity. We'll ask a variety of questions including: How has the 20th and 21st century novel represented the attempt to delineate the shape of individual lives through 'portraits'? What changes to the novel's terrain have been effected by contemporary history, war, or historical trauma? How useful is the term postmodernism for describing contemporary writing? How have high and mass cultural forms, such as visual art, the cinema, the web, etc. influenced contemporary writing? How do recent novels portray the aesthetic? What different ideas of temporality do we find in modernist and postmodernist writing? What versions of borrowing from the past do we find in modernism and postmodernism and what purposes do these borrowings serve? Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a 'great divide' between modernism and postmodernism? What continuities might we find between modernism and postmodernism (if those terms are still useful)? Authors read will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Coe and Marilynne Robinson.

Phenomenology

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module will examine works in the phenomenological tradition, which includes such philosophers as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas and Derrida. Usually the readings will be focused around a specific theme. Central questions include: how did phenomenologists after Husserl modify his phenomenological method? How does one best address the question of 'the other' phenomenologically? How do phenomenologists tackle issues of language, art and history?

Philosophy Special Subject

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

In exceptional circumstances, where you can demonstrate a specific need to work on an area of philosophy which is directly related to the current research of a faculty member, that faculty member may agree to supervise you on that topic for a term.

Psychoanalysis and Creative Writing

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Psychoanalysis has exciting and major implications for all kinds of writing, not least that sort called 'creative'. This module will focus on some of the ways in which a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, especially those of Sigmund Freud himself, can be linked to the theory and practice of creative writing. We will look in particular detail at how Freud's work illuminates the question of literature (and vice versa) in relation to such topics as the uncanny, fantasy and day-dreaming, story-telling and the death drive, chance, humour, mourning and loss. Concentrating on detailed reading and discussion of a series of psychoanalytic, critical and literary texts, the module will lead you through to having an opportunity to submit a term-paper work that may (if you wish) include a creative writing as well as a critical component.

Psychoanalysis and the Image

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module turns to psychoanalysis as a powerful way of thinking about the idea of the image, and the politics of vision, in contemporary cultural life. You will read a selection of texts in psychoanalysis including Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott. This will help you to explore ideas of violence and spectacle, sexuality and power, identity and hatred, and to reflect on psychoanalytic understandings of vision and visuality.

Religion and Enlightenment

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

Half a century ago, friends and foes of the Enlightenment were at least agreed that this phenomenon in European history was characterised by anti-clericalism and some degree of critical distance to religion. Today and for several years many scholars are defending an Enlightenment that is, if not a religious movement, at least intimately intertwined with religion. So while the concept of `Enlightenment values has retained its colloquial meaning in ordinary language, its basis in scholarship has been steadily eroded.

Those in need of a clear concept of Enlightenment that is serviceable for public debate may be excused for thinking that the state of scholarly work has become exceptionally divided and confusing, especially concerning the issue of religion. The scholarly discussion has been so intensive and complex, that often it can be hard to see the simpler and more basic issues, and one cannot help but get a feeling that scholars are talking past each other, because they try and fail to mean the same thing by Enlightenment and religion.

Much of the work that has been done has consisted in using the relationship between Enlightenment and religion to re-define the concept of either or of both. In fact, much of the discussion has been a succession of encounters between different kinds of history. More particularly, it has become a debate about the role of intellectual history in our understanding of the past, and since this form of history itself has undergone quite fundamental changes in the same period, it is hardly surprising that the outcome has been as unhelpful for the beating of drums as it has been encouraging for the necessary scepticism of scholarship.

This module examines the relationship between religion and enlightenment across the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and radical Protestant worlds, in addition to scrutinising the relationship between enlightenment and Judaism, Islam, and the forms of religious practice in the Orthodox world. Traditional perspectives on the relationship between enlightenment and atheistic or anti-religious beliefs with also been examined.

Style: The Necessary Failure

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Style is what draws us to works of art, but it is also something that we find very difficult to define or describe. It is understood variously as belonging to groups or to individuals; as being difficult or easy; as something superficial to the work of art, or else as the substance of its depths; as either apolitical, or as the sign and guarantor of political commitment. This module will pursue the problem of artistic style across a number of periods and artistic media, including literature, visual art, and cinema. Readings will include works of aesthetic theory and philosophy, film theory, literary theory and criticism, and art history. We will think about style as a historically shifting category of artistic experience by engaging a number of case studies in which style becomes an object of contention, controversy, or disagreement.

Theory in Practice: Readings in Contemporary Theory and Literature

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

What is 'theory'? Although it goes in and out of fashion with the speed of rising or plunging hemlines, the use of theory, literary theory, or literary criticism as a way to read literary texts is always useful. And contrary to popular opinion, it's not the application of an arcane or secret language to garner a secret knowledge. Rather, it is a self-conscious and informed method of analysing the presuppositions behind the apparently natural way we read; indeed, sometimes it's a method of reading in itself, derived from a philosophy or theory of language, as is the case with Bataille or Derrida. Theory sounds dull, but really it's a creative practice, as is reading, which Walter Benjamin likened to telepathy.

This module seeks, through a number of case studies, to address a number of critical paradigms that have proved significant in the post-war period. In particular, notions of materialism, materiality and historicity will be set in tension with ideas about relativism, deconstruction and 'play' as very different ways of construing some iconic American texts. Alongside the close reading of primary and secondary texts, discussions in class will be directed towards such subjects as: the construction/reflection of subjectivity in language and discourse; the relation of the literary text to sociality; the effects and efficacy of modernist/avant-garde/postmodern literary techniques; and the writing of race, gender and class.