Foucault, selections from Discipline and Punish

 (online) and other goodies:

• Discipline and Punish - Chapter 1, The Body of the Condemned
• Discipline and Punish - Chapter 3, Panopticism
• The Eye of Power - Excerpt from an interview
• Video: Debat avec Noam Chomsky - Extraits sous-titrés en français, 1971, 12 min.

Major critical approaches to literature; systems of Aristotle, Dryden or Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge; a modern critic or a contemporary critical problem.

Richter, David. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Third Edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2007.

While technically we will not be considering aesthetic theory until later in the quarter, we might make use of some of its assumptions as we read earlier theorists. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty, as in the fine arts. Although we might argue with the premise that the purpose of art and specifically literature is the creation or expression of beauty, such a premise underlies most writers on the subject well into the twentieth century and persists in many contemporary critical formulations.

Someone interested in aesthetics would ask the following questions about each of the readings in this course:

1. According to this theory, why do human beings make art and why are they audiences for art?
2. According to this theory, what is the difference between art and other things?
3. According to this theory, what is the difference between aesthetic experience and other kinds of experience?
4. According to this theory, what does the artist contribute to make a thing art?
5. According to this theory, (how) is art related to the moral, social, political, economic and cultural context in which it is created?