Department of English

WHAT IS AN ORGANIC FORM?
English 600 S. Stewart - J. M. Rabate Wednesday 12-3

Syllabus:

Sept. 3. Introduction: posing the question regarding parts and wholes
Wallace Stevens "Bouquet"
Percy Shelley "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc"

Sept. 10. Some unities
Aristotle: Poetics
Bergson selected pages from "Creative Duration"

Sept. 17. Unifying libido
Freud on the death drive and creativity
Plato: Symposium

Sept. 24. An Aristotelian Form
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano

Oct. 1 Forming Nature
Henry Home, Lord Kames, from Elements of Criticism: On Gardens
Schiller Naive and Sentimental Poetry
Young "Conjectures on original composition"
(screening of Peter Greenaway, "The Draughtsman's Contract")

October 8 Forming Nature continued
On Gardens: presentation by John Dixon Hunt
Thomas Browne "The Garden of Cyrus"
Discussion of Greenaway

October 15 Production and Reproduction
Plato: Symposium
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Edmund Gosse: Father and Son

October 22 Mechanical and Organic
Coleridge, comments on "Mechanic and Organic Form"
Shakespeare, "A Winter's Tale"
Schlegel: fragments on organic form
Edgar A. Poe: "The Telltale Heart" and "The Philosophy of Composition".
(screening of "Angels and Insects")

October 29 The organicist fallacy
Paul de Man, from Allegories of Reading
Walter Benjamin, from The German Tragic Drama
A. S. Byatt Angels and Insects

Nov 5 Marxism and the concept of totality
Antonio Gramsci on organic intellectuals, selections from The Gramsci Reader
James Joyce "A Painful Case" from Dubliners

Nov 12 The Utopian Organic
Gaudi in Barcelona (screening of short documentary film in class)
Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Arakawa and Gins The Architectural Body

Nov 19 From Futurism to OULIPO
Marinetti, selections
Gaudier-Brzeska: Blast manifesto and sculptures.
Harry Mathews Twenty lines a day

Nov 26 Workshop

Dec 3 Workshop

All course books are available at the Penn Book Center, 34th and Sansom Streets The remainder of the readings will be made available in photocopy.

Requirements: The proseminar is the first half of the year-long introduction to graduate students and preliminary to the proseminar exam that will be given in the Autumn of 2004. Students in this seminar will be asked to write weekly three-page response papers and to make at least one class presentation. By December 5 a ten-page final research paper or research proposal addressing issues from the course should be submitted.

Jean-Michel Rabate T 3-4:30 & by appointment
Susan Stewart T 2-4 & by appointment

Fulfills X & X requirements.