ENGL7033 · English

Doing What Happens: Action and Event in Modern Literature

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Can works of art and, especially, works of literature teach us anything about what it means to act in the world? Should we treat these works as themselves the products of meaningful actions? Or should we think of them instead as the effects of unconscious (social or libidinal or linguistic) forces? Have current events climate change for example thanks to their complexity or their scale, made effective action harder to imagine? In this class, we'll consider how these questions are broached in works of literature, philosophy, and visual art composed over, roughly, the last century and half. We'll likely discuss novelists including Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Tom McCarthy; theorists including Elizabeth Anscombe, Bruno Latour, and Walter Benn Michaels; and visual artists including Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Smithson. This class should be of interest to students of literature, students of philosophy, and anyone who wants to develop a more thoughtful relationship to literary texts. Assignments will include Canvas posts, a book review, and a longer seminar paper. Fulfills the graduate theory requirement.