Professor Edwin Mccann, School of Philosophy T. A. Brian Blackwell
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CORE 101 SYMBOLS AND CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS FALL 2010 Professor Edwin McCann, School of Philosophy T. A. Brian Blackwell Lecture TTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. THH 114 63500D Dis F 9:00-9:50 a.m. THH106 63501D Dis F 10:00-10:50 a.m. THH106 63502D Lab W 05:00-8:00 p.m. THH201 63507R Representation: Mind, word and image Course epigram: ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul.’ Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment §25. [‘Die menschliche Körper ist das beste Bild der Menschlichen Seele.’] We live in a world of meanings: we manufacture many different things that have meanings, such as poems, paintings, novels, films, road signs, trail markers, TV commercials, physical theories, and so on, endlessly. These are complex artifacts the meanings of which are embedded in a rich variety of systems of interpretation, implicit and explicit. Some of these things function as representations of other things, some evoke thought or elicit emotion directly. In all of this the central agent is the human mind; meanings wouldn't exist without it. The central question of the course is: how does the mind make, and respond to, meanings? How are complex considerations about medium, narrative convention, genre, and allusion (intertextuality) involved in the construction of meaning of a given literary (in the broadest sense) artifact? How do we use various representational strategies to think about the nature of human beings and the human condition? We'll address this question in the first part of the course by looking at Shakespeare's play Hamlet (and in addition, some of that play's sources), and tracing the relations between it and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, also considering along the way Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, which is an important reference point and inspiration for Stoppard's play. We'll be comparing both print and film versions of these works, and will consider as well basic questions about performance of these works (on stage, on film, and in one's imagination as one reads the text). We'll pay particular attention, in this regard, to the 'play within the play' structure in both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and in addition to the self- reflexiveness concerning theater in all three of the plays. In the second part of the course we'll look at transformations--metamorphoses--of the human as ways of exploring the truth of the human condition. We'll begin with selections from Ovid's poem The Metamorphoses, in which the idea of physical transformation is used to express the meaning and nature of love, moral transgression, and our place in the world. Building on Ovid but infusing his own fertile imagination, Dante Alighieri puts the idea of transformation into a Christian worldview. Flashing forward into modernity, we'll look at Franz Kafka's classic story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), which explores the transformation of an ordinary man into a gigantic insect as a physical manifestation of his spiritual poverty. Switching genres, we'll then lighten things up, looking at two satirical pieces in which a human body part stands in for the human being itself (in Gogol's The Nose a man's nose takes over for him in living his life, and in Roth's The Breast a man is turned into that part of the body). We'll close off this part of the course by considering some of the variations on the human that have captured the popular imagination, including werewolves and zombies (human beings transformed), androids (humanoids manufactured by humans endowed with machine consciousness), manufactured monsters cobbled together out of human corpses (Frankenstein's monster). In Part three we’ll focus in on one particularly popular breed of transformed human beings: vampires. A number of central themes and concerns come together in the notion of a vampire: immortality; predation and parasitism; exoticism; and of course, sex. We'll begin with Bram Stoker's seminal gothic novel Dracula, interesting in its own right because of its epistolary or documentary narrative structure. We’ll then see how a whole spate of vampire films, from Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens; Herzog's 1979 remake, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht; and others, both refer back to Stoker’s novel and connect with current concerns in popular culture. The fourth part of the course addresses the question of the nature of representation and meaning as a question in philosophy. We will begin by studying a classic work of seventeenth century philosophy, Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, and will analyze his complex arguments against skepticism and in favor of the new science. We proceed on to the twentieth century philosophers’ preoccupation with language, carefully analyzing two very influential works by one of the most important twentieth century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which revolutionized the philosophical world when it was published in 1921, he presented the 'picture theory of meaning' for language, and his equally revolutionary second book, Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in the 1950s, in which he argued against his own earlier theory, and against much of the philosophical tradition as well, including Descartes. We'll come out of this section of the course with an appreciation of the complexities of the relations between mind, meaning, language, knowledge, and the world. I can't promise that we'll settle the large questions, but we'll at least be clearer about what they are. Required Book List 1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy : With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Tr. and ed. Cottingham. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge U.P. ISBN 0521558182. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. Pears & McGuinness. Routledge. ISBN 0415254086. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Ed. Hacker & Schulte. Wiley- Blackwell. ISBN-13: 978-1405159289 4. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Grove Press. ISBN 0802130348 5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Hoy. 2nd Edition. W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN 0393956636. 6. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Grove Press. ISBN 0802132758. 7. Dante, Inferno ed. Mazzotta, tr. Palma. Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton and Co. pb W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN 978-0393977967 8. Bram Stoker, Dracula. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Auerbach & Skal. W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN 0393970124 9. Ovid, The Metamorphoses tr. Melville. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0199537372 10. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0199238552 11. Nikolai Gogol, The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories tr. Ronald Wilks. Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: 978-0140449075 12. Philip Roth, The Breast. Vintage. ISBN-13: 978-0679749011 Course requirements 1. Regular attendance and participation in lectures, screenings, lab, and discussions. Counts for 15% of the course grade. 2. Six unannounced in-class quizzes on the reading and/or film viewing due on that day; the average of the four best quiz grades will count for 15% of the course grade. 3. Four short papers. At the beginning of each part of the course I will hand out a list of topics, one for each week of that part. You can then choose which week or which topic you’ll do your paper on, allowing you to structure your workload so that it fits with your other classes and commitments and to give you the choice of topics which interest you. There are two options for papers. The first, known as the Regular Option, is three 3 page papers, one from each of the first three parts of the course, and one 4-5 page paper on a topic from the fourth part of the course. The second, the Philosophy Option, has you writing two 3 page papers on any two of the first three parts of the course, and two 4-5 page papers on part four of the course, one on Descartes and one on Wittgenstein. On the Regular Option, each 3 page paper counts for 10%, and the 4-5 page paper for 20%. On the Philosophy Option, each 3 page paper counts for 10% and each 4-5 page paper counts for 15%. Taken together, the papers count for 50% of the course grade. 4. One in-class final exam, two essays from a list distributed in advance. Counts for 20% of course grade. Schedule of Lectures and Readings Tu Aug 24 Introduction and overview Part one: Ghosts, Dreams, Madness, and Blood: The Play's the Thing Th Aug 26 Hamlet as poetry, as play, and as text for interpretation. Reading: William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in Hoy, pp. 1-101. Tu Aug 31 Hamlet and plays within plays. Reading: William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in Hoy, pp. 1-101 (again); Saxo Grammaticus, Amleth, and F. de Belleforest, The Hystorie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke in Hoy, pp. 134-43. Th Sep 2 Hamlet on film. Viewing: Hamlet, Laurence Olivier (dir.), 1948 (Laurence Olivier as Hamlet); Hamlet, Michael Almereyda (dir.), 2000 (modernized version with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet); Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh (dir.), 1996 (Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet); Hamlet, Franco Zeffirelli (dir.), 1990 (Mel Gibson as Hamlet); Hamlet, Rodney Bennett (dir.), 1980 (BBC version, Derek Jacobi as Hamlet); Gamlet, Grigory Kozintsev (dir.), 1963 (Innokenti Smoktunovsky as Hamlet); Hamlet, Gregory Doran (dir.), 2009 (David Tennant as Hamlet). Tu Sep 7 Living in a universe (and a play) without meaning. Reading: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Th Sep 9 Trapped in a play: Beckett meets Shakespeare via Stoppard.