Dr.
M. Facknitz 3
credits
The History of Literary Criticism is a survey of key principles in literary studies and aesthetics from classical times to the early twentieth century. The course is particularly valuable to anyone considering graduate school in English, anyone seriously interested in cross-disciplinary work in the arts and human sciences, or anyone interested in aesthetics. The spine of the course is a journal, reviewed several times and based on hundreds of probing questions about the readings. This course has a really serious syllabus! At its best, the course dizzies students who are later acrobatic, elegant, mentally buff. In the fifteen weeks students consider the significance of Plato’s conflation of god with Good to render a monotheist’s God; Aristotle’s katharsis; Horace’s pissing on the paternal ashes; Plotinus’s goofy-sublime cosmic Thereness; what anagogy means to Thomists, Dante, and Renaissance humanists; the three unities in Corneille; why wit once equaled wisdom; why Johnson faulted the Bard and why he preferred his tulips unstreaked; how fact became fiction and truth became unknowable in the mind of a Sicilian bookworm; what tobacco proved to David Hume; how Kant’s transcendental self is true because it’s unknowable, and beauty is knowable only through its shadows of pleasure and good; why Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics revived protestant theology and provoked modern literary criticism; how Schiller may be the funnest guy to play with in forever and ever; how which Hegel you see depends on how you voted last time around and whether or not you take yourself seriously when you pray; why the English Romantics wanted more than they could really eat, and which one of them checked their self-indulgent appetite for cream-filled suspensions of disbelief and ephemeral visitations of divinity; what is meliorism, and how is it not implied by Marxist determinism; what success really resides in burning always like a “hard gemlike flame”; what’s the difference between art’s relation to wish-fulfillment versus archetypes; why in the age of movies do we need to be especially aware that history is written by the victors; who really cares that society is eternally and amoebicly carceral; why is it not vandalism but upside down and backwards to
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