UCL - Literary aesthetics

[ROM2710]

[22.5h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s): Pierre Piret

Language: French

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

The aim of this course is to bring into light the particular dynamic of the inheritance and of the appropriation that underlie the act of writing. It tries to identify the discursive hard cores of the main literary genders - beyond the conventional rhetorical rules and the styles bond to the history of the aesthetical movements - and to analyse the way these works use this inheritance in an inventive manner.
At the end of this course, students will be able to explain, thanks to the analysing tools used by the teacher and with an argumentation, the aesthetical principles that underlie a work or a group of works ; to measure their effects in terms of thematic, rhetoric, stylistic and statement ; to situate them in a historical perspective.

Main themes

At the master level, the literary formation prioritises the theoretical and methodological orientations. Therefore, there is no constraints regarding to the studied periods, but the questions envisaged are very precisely delimited, and the examples are chosen in order to prove concretely the efficiency of the theoretical tools which are used. The possible exportation of these tools to other corpuses will also be explained.
This course focuses on the literary material : language as an inherited structure from which one constructs himself. Thanks to methods issued from literary theory, philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, it will be explained how literary works invent their own language, using their particular rhetorical and generic inheritance, and how they contribute to the transformation of the significations that build the social link. The course will also focus on the mutations which have affected the representative systems during the Modern Temps (from the invention of printing works to the modern media) and measure their effects on literature.

Content and teaching methods

Defining and situating aesthetics in the field of contemporary literature studies, starting from this hypothesis : the technical expansion and the development of new "epresentative apparatuses" are some of the factors which have contributed to transform the relationship between man and language, as well as to modify radically the status, the function and the value of literature - which is now to be considered in an aesthetic way, and no longer a rhetorical way.
This modification becomes obvious through the appearance of a few new questions, which this course is meant to highlight and to explore by focusing on three important works :
-Diderot : we will be concentrating on the function devoted to the addressing, the Other (in a Lacanian sense) and the dialogism.
-Proust : attention will be paid to the dialectics of letter and object, of writing and what escapes to writing.
-Genet : we will study the symbolic function and its grip on man and society.
Method : the course will rely on a theoretical orientation, but is developed in an empirical way, by analyzing the selected works. The aim is to clarify the aesthetical project (conscious or not) on which they are based and to show the results of it on the author's works. This method relies on questions and concepts that can be exported.
Personal readings will be asked from the students beforehand.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Prerequisite : to be able to decode in a precise and argumentative way a literary text (objective of the courses of Modern Authors from the first cycle); to know the main debates, questions and stakes of the modern and contemporary literary theory.