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PH989 Deleuze and Literature

Tutor:  Dr Darren Ambrose                         Spring Term:  Tuesday 2.00-4.00

 

This module will provide an opportunity to explore certain aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s contribution to the contemporary philosophical understanding of literature. We will focus upon analysing some of the broader ontological questions connected to Deleuze’s aesthetics theory before concentrating upon specific issues concerning philosophy’s relation to literary language, form and creativity. Topics will include the role of literature as the production of what Deleuze terms ‘lines of flight’ and the creation of ‘visions and auditions’; the notion of Minor Language; the vocation of literature; and the creative pedagogy associated with literature. We will focus largely upon Deleuze’s treatment of three ‘literary’ authors – Kafka, Artaud and Beckett; but the course will also make reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Melville, Hardy, Woolf, Lawrence and Fitzgerald.

Primary Texts

  • G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Verso, 1998)
  • G. Deleuze, Logic of Sense (Continuum, 2004)
  • G. Deleuze & C. Parnet, Dialogues (Continuum, 2002)
  • G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota U.P., 1986)
  • G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Continuum, 2004)
  • G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Verso, 1994)
  • F. Kafka, The Trial (Penguin, 2004)
  • F. Kafka, The Castle (Penguin, 2004)
  • F. Kafka, America (Penguin, 2004)
  • F. Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin, 2004)
  • F. Kafka, The Great Wall of Chinaand Other Stories (Penguin, 2004)
  • A. Artaud, Anthology (City Lights, 1967)
  • S. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (Faber & Faber, 1998)