Recent Course Syllabi
English 528 Professor Daniel Hack
Spring 1999 Office: Clemens 429
T 3:30-6:10 645-2575 x1038
Clemens 309 dhack@acsu.buffalo.edu
Office hrs: TTh 11-12
Literature: Writing and Materiality
In his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observes that
"there is some bodily ingredient in the labour most purely mental, when it
generates any external result. Newton could not have produced the Principia
without the bodily exertion either of penmanship or of dictation." Fair
enough, we might say, but what follows from this observation? Does this
"bodily ingredient" make it possible to "assimilate the ‘production’
of texts . . . to the production of goods by factory workers . . . and to the
experience of the resistance of matter in genuine manual labor"—or does
such an equation constitute an act of "intellectual dishonesty," as
Fredric Jameson charges? Does a recognition of the physicality of writing pose a
threat to Theodor Adorno’s claim that "culture originates in the radical
separation of mental and physical work"? Or instead might such a
recognition simply lead us to join Thomas Carlyle in savoring the paradox that
"poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them" constitute "the
purest embodiment a Thought of man can have"?
As this farrago of questions and quotations is meant to suggest, this course
will explore the ways in which the materiality of writing does and does not
matter, both in Victorian culture and in twentieth-century criticism and
critical theory. Focusing primarily on a series of Victorian novels (along with
the linked Victorian discourses of authorship and begging-letter writing), we’ll
consider the significance writers have ascribed to, and the connections they
have discovered between, the physical materiality of books and documents, the
economic materiality of the literary marketplace, and the notorious
"materiality of the signifier." We’ll ask how bodies are like texts,
and vice versa. At issue as well will be the possible material preconditions and
material effects of cultural production, aesthetic experience, and specific
tropes such as allegory and irony.
Course requirements: You will be expected to come to class each week prepared
to begin discussion with a question or observation about the week’s reading.
You will also be required to write a 20-page paper addressing some text or
theoretical issue raised by the course (due Tuesday, May 4), and to make a
fifteen-minute presentation on the topic of your research paper
Eng 679/Comp Lit 736
Spring 2000
Prof. Daniel Hack
Allegory
Usurped as a narrative mode by the novel and rejected as a rhetorical figure
in the epochal poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth, allegory has been widely
denigrated and neglected for the better part of two centuries. Yet over the past
quarter-century or so, allegory has emerged as a crucial topic in literary
theory and criticism: allegory plays an indispensable role in the work of
arguably the most important deconstructionist critic of our time, Paul de Man,
of the leading U. S. Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and of the hugely
influential if unclassifiable Walter Benjamin, and important work on and with
allegory has also been done in recent times by critics working from avowedly
feminist, new historicist, philosophical, postcolonial, postmodernist, and
psychoanalytical perspectives (to name only those we’ll tackle). Tracking
allegory’s progress through the wilderness of literary studies, as this course
proposes to do, should therefore teach us much about the ways of both allegory
and contemporary criticism and theory.
Above all, allegory will serve in this course as an exemplary site for the
study of the nature of representation and interpretation and of the ideological
(political, ethical, metaphysical, . . . ) implications and affiliations of
tropes, literary forms, and reading practices. We will also spend a good deal of
time examining (and joining in) the current rethinking of the version of
literary history adumbrated in the first sentence of this course description.
Accordingly, we will attend to the treatment and use of allegory in Romanticism
and in the nineteenth-century novel; more specifically, we’ll read poetry and
prose by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and perhaps Shelley and/or Keats; and novels
by Balzac (La Cousine Bette), Dickens (Bleak House), Eliot (Daniel
Deronda), and Schreiner (Story of an African Farm), as well as tales
by Hawthorne. Critics we’ll read, in addition to those mentioned above, will
likely include Aijaz Ahmad, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, Sharon Cameron,
Jonathan Culler, Wai-chee Dimock, Joel Fineman, Angus Fletcher, Mary Jacobus,
Roman Jakobson, Anne McClintock, Elaine Scarry, and Doris Sommer. If there is
sufficient demand, we’ll also find time to think about allegory and film, with
Hitchcock’s Vertigo our focus.
Course requirements: active class participation, oral presentation, term
paper.
