Syllabus, Philosophy 390, Seminar: Literature vs. Philosophy, Spring 2005

CRN 20108, 6-9 p.m. Tuesdays in UANX 127

Prof. J. W. Powell, Ph.D.; e-mail, jwp2@humboldt.edu;

Website: www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2; Office: 110 UANX; ph. x5753

Office hours: 10 Mondays and Wednesdays, 1-2 Wednesdays, Thursdays 11-12, and by appt.

Your odds are good of catching me anytime I'm not teaching or in committee meetings.

Description:

“Anything philosophy can do, literature can do better.” 

“Oh, yeah? What’s your argument?”

            This may be difficult. We are going to try to find our way through some problems, but the problems are problems we have to invent, to some extent, along the way. We will work toward or will investigate some of the following questions: What is the relation between consciousness in our everyday life and consciousness in literature? What is the relation between consciousness in our everyday life and the accounts of consciousness we find in philosophy? (Subquestions: Do literature and philosophy change our understanding of our own consciousness? for the better, or for the worse?) What does philosophy do, anyway? What does literature do? In particular, we will look at literature and at philosophy as they treat death and tragedy, and then at how they deal with love, with loneliness and community, with heroism, and with language, including how they portray themselves and each other and how they treat ineffability and limits of language. There are way too many relevant works to consider. My choices are idiosyncratic, perhaps. If you think of others I should include, get a copy to me right away. I have avoided some of the traditional problems in philosophy of literature.

            There are a few philosophers’ works where the boundary between literature and philosophy is obscure. We’ll read some of those. (Plato [Apology, the myth of Er, Symposium, the story of Thoth, Socrates’ death scene, the attack on artists in The Republic], Augustine’s “Ad Magisterium,” Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Sartre from Nausee, and The Words, Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics, Bouwsma’s evil genius and argument from design, Nussbaum on the Symposium, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, S. K. on Abraham and Isaac, James on mystical conversion, Dennett’s “Where Am I?”, Rorty’s autobiographical essay attacking philosophy in Philosophy and Social Hope, Cody, “On the Difference It Makes,” Iris Murdoch, the case of M and D from “The Sovereignty of Good,” Powell’s “How to Hear What Indians Say,” and “Mightn’t Language Be Inadequate?”, Nye, intro to Words of Power, APA Newsletter on Indian Philosophy, v. 2 no.1.,

            We’ll also read some other things in order to help with background or methods. Descartes, I and II from Meditations on First Philosophy; Plato, the myth of the Cave from The Republic; Powell, “Preface;” Powell, “On the Nonexistence of Perceptions;” Ryle, “The Ghost in the Machine” from The Concept of Mind; Xuang Tzu, from the inner chapters;

Schedule:       I plan to use short stories and longer literary works to organize our tasks. They and their subject matters will dictate what philosophy we read and also what poetry we read. First are stories about love, though of course they are also about a lot more than that. So we’ll read some philosophy regarding love, and some poems regarding love. I don’t think this round is much of a contest, myself–the philosophers won’t get in the ring, with a couple of exceptions, because they know they would be hanging on the ropes, their chests heaving, within a couple of minutes. Plato is our guy.

            Next we’ll work on death. The topics overlap, as they should. But this will take a bit to get to. Then ineffability, though some of the earlier works will also point in these directions. We will find ourselves working on something here which is difficult to get at, the opacity of existence or some Zen insight. Also, ineffability turns out to be linked by writers with how philosophers and how authors think of their own tasks, so that gets pulled in here, lit about lit, philosophy about philosophy. There’s a danger we’ll eat ourselves alive. We may then read about loneliness and community, though philosophers and literary authors alike tend to understand loneliness much better than community. The works here may require we reach outside the canon.

            It now strikes me as odd that there are so few philosophers’ works with literary merit on the topics of love, death, loneliness, time and impermanence, cruelty and kindness, tragedy and comedy. As soon as you’ve read Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre, the bucket comes back up with very little in it. We have to go begging down the road at the lit campground to keep on cooking.

            So we will. We’ll read some very fine shortstories and poetry and some excerpts from novels and cook them down to a fare-thee-well and perhaps still have to pound them with rocks before we can come up with oversimplifications to fit. Here are short stories and such we will probably read.

            Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”

            Kawabata, “The Izu Dancer”

            Leslie Marmon Silko, “Lullabye”

            Mishima, “The Female Impersonator”

            Hemingway, “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

            Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, “The Accomplice”

            Alan Lightman, from Einstein’s Dreams

            Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”

            Louis Owens, “Blessed Sunshine,” Holy Spirit, “Noah and the Ark”

            Aeschylus, Orestes

            Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

            Tom McGuane, driving the stolen car from Miami to Bozeman, from 92 in the Shade

            Adrian Louis, “The Earth Bone Connected to the Spirit Bone”

            Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”

            James Joyce, “The Dead”

            Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons

            Flannery O’Connor, “Piety”

            Carson McCullers on love, from Ballad of the Sad Café

            Jeremy Bernstein, “The Faculty Meeting”

            Kingsly Amis, Lucky Jim

            Tim O’Brien, “How To Tell a True War Story”

            Henry Miller, on his mother, from the autobiography, and on the daft woman downstairs, from Tropic of Capricorn.

Course Format: Readings are central to this course, but the main business will take place in the classroom, in mixed lecture and discussion. The proportion of lecture to discussion will vary. Students will sometimes need to pay close attention to stay on top of the structure of discussion. I hardly ever show videotapes, and I use the blackboard rather than overheads. I have accommodated students with various forms of disability. Exam questions and essay assignments are always made available at least a week before they are due. Students can participate in discussion via e-mail but not as a substitute for coming to class. I write and hand out summary letters to the class at various points during the semester, which may help tie discussions together.

Texts and Materials: There will be no texts to buy; all readings will be provided through in-class handouts or will be accessed via HSU’s Blackboard server on the Internet, or will be on reserve at the library.

Grading: In this course, there will be three midterms and a final. Each midterm will have a short, picky multiple-choice section and then a choice among four or more essay questions. You will do each multiple choice section in class, each essay (probably a seven-page or so paper) at home. You may if you like replace one of the midterms by doing a presentation in class, accompanied by a 500 word handout in which you summarize for the class what you are doing. Grade for the course will be the average of the exam/presentation grades, except that if you are doing better at the end I will drop the first grade. I will provide models and a handout on criteria before the first exam. There will be some short writing exercises in class, none of them graded and most of them to be kept for your own intellectual log. Outstanding participation in class or via e-mail discussion notes to the class will be rewarded by up to one third of a grade added on.

The Instructor: I’ve been teaching philosophy for about twenty-five years. My Ph.D. is from the University of Oregon in Eugene, where I taught for a dozen years. I’m particularly interested in ancient philosophy, philosophy of language, critical thinking, and philosophy of education, but I’ve lots of other interests as well. You can see some of those interests on my website. This course is one I’ve been wanting to teach for some time. I did an undergraduate major in English Literature, and three years of graduate work in literature. I’ve taught writing (from remedial writing through composition to writing of poetry) and literature courses (survey of American and English Lit, Native American Lit, a course called Psychology in 20^th Century Lit).