CSLC 201 Forms of Feeling, and a Feeling for Form: Literature and Its Lifeworlds
The words of literature, unlike soda cans, bits of data, or the modular classroom furniture of Johnson Hall, do not come to us in easily separable pieces; the words of literature, rather, always present themselves to us as parts of a greater whole, as participants in this or that literary FORM: a poem, a play, a novel, a song... In this class, we shall set aside the usual preoccupation with the meaning of the words of literature, to investigate instead the various effects that different literary forms exert upon us. What, for instance, do narrative forms --from Babylonian epic to the experimental prose of David Foster Wallace and Karl Ove Knausgaard--tell us about the kinds of worlds that are ours to inhabit in our daily lives? How do the poetic forms of (say) the ballad, the haiku, the sonnet or pop song inflect the manner in which we every day take up our existence? How does drama--from Ancient Greek tragedy to Japanese noh to the theatres of the avant-garde, the cruel and the absurd--open up for us the experience of all those "others" with whom we share this life? By the end of this class, it is hoped that students will have developed not only a feeling for literature in its many forms, but reciprocally, an appreciation for the richness of experience such forms of feeling can bestow upon us.