Aims
This course aims to:
• study three classical literary texts with fresh eyes
• give you an orientation to literary study that empowers individual responses and close reading
• consider how literature engages with philosophical ideas – and how a shift in philosophical framework can unlock new literary critical perspectives
Content
In this course, you’ll have the chance to explore how literary texts can engage with ideas in a unique way: namely, by exploring them at an aesthetic or affective level, without necessarily worrying about whether or not they are true. We’ll begin with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play that seems to goad its audience into finding a definitive interpretation (for example, as an exploration of messianism or as an existentialist meditation) but ultimately evades them all. We’ll then turn to Hamlet and explore how Shakespeare dramatizes the religious anxieties of his age by presenting contradictory ideas about the afterlife and about the ethics of revenge, while never seeking to resolve the contradiction. Our final core text is Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, in which the narrator’s quest to understand his enigmatic employee mirrors the reader’s own desire to get their head around the text itself. You will see that while all three texts evade any final closure on their themes and ideas, this actually opens up new opportunities for us as readers and empowers each of us to take the texts at a more emotionally engaged and sensitive level, akin to appreciating a piece of music or a work of abstract art.
Throughout the course, we will also look at how allegory works – with a focus on Plato’s famous allegory of the cave – while also seeking an alternative to allegorical or representationalist readings of literary texts, with a bit of help from an enigmatic line in a fourth century Buddhist scripture and the work of the Japanese novelist Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji.
There will be plenty of opportunity to share your own reflections on the core texts – as well as a handful of poems that we will look at along the way. You are also welcome to extend the discussion to reflect on how allegory, ideas, and non-representationalism work in other texts you have read.
Presentation of the course
The course will be presented in lecture format, but with ample time for discussion and questions.
Course sessions
1. Introduction: This session will introduce the course, starting with an exploration of Beckett’s statement about the ‘Shape of Ideas’ and how this challenges our usual assumptions about the communication of a text’s so-called ‘message’.
2. Does Mr Godot have a beard? This second session focuses on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, its various critical interpretations over the years, and its playful engagement with extra-textual and metatheatrical content.
3. Thinking makes it so: This third session will look at Hamlet, competing theories of the afterlife, Renaissance understandings of revenge, and different critical approaches to Shakespeare’s work from Keats to Borges and beyond.
4. One of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable: Our fourth session looks at Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and considers how the text seems to flirt with allegory, just like Melville’s magnum opus: Moby-Dick.
5. Lucid fictions: towards a profoundly superficial way of reading. The final session will sum up everything that we have discussed so far and consider how our approach could be applied to literary study more widely.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• a deeper understanding and appreciation for Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and ‘Bartleby’
• a greater confidence in thinking and talking about literary texts, informed by close reading and by a non-representationalist approach to literary study
• an understanding of what literary texts do: how they affect us as readers and how we can enjoy them all the more when we are aware of this
Required reading (please bring your copies to every session)
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett*
Recommended edition: Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 2006)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare*
Recommend edition: Edited by Thompson, Ann, and Taylor, Neil, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, Revised Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville*
Recommend edition: Melville, Herman, Milder, Robert (ed), Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009)
