Okay, Change in plan.
Rather than reading through all this in the kind of week-by-week way you might in a traditional college course, we'll work from two lists, and take our sweet time doing so. The general "workload" is whatever you want to put in. Generally, a blog post per text would be a good baseline. Read the other posts, and respond to them with questions.
Maybe we'll all come up with some research-M.A.-dissertation-length monster-opus.
Maybe we'll video record "lectures" of our own devising on some of our thoughts on particular ideas. Maybe we'll have regular or semi-regular virtual conferences.
________________________________________________________________________
The first list, ordered numerically, are the texts we're actively reading. As we go along, we might order these even further into blocks. These blocks will help us to keep pace with one another. The general rule is, read everything in the current Block. Write about it. Don't progress to the next Block until the cohort is ready to move on. Tag your posts #mimesis #Block1 or whatever Block you're on.
For ease, I suggest we keep the Blocks relatively small. If something comes up in the discussion of a Block that demands closer attention, it should be added to Block 2.
Block 1 - In progress
- Plato's The Republic
- Plato's Symposium
- Aristotle's Poetics
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.”
- http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson
- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/
- Aristophanes, "The Frogs"
- G. Gebauer, C. Wulf, Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society (Berkeley 1992)
- S. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton 2002
________________________________________________________________________
The second list, not ordered at all, is all of the books and articles we want to read but haven't yet. Anyone can add to these. Generally, the Not Started Blocks above will be built out with texts from this list. When something moves to a numbered Block, it should be deleted here.
- Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially the stories of Narcissus (Book 3) and Pygmalion (Book 10)
- Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
- Shakespeare's Hamlet
- Euripides' Bacchae
- Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
- Aeschylus' Prometheus Unbound
- Homer, Illiad, Odyssey
- Auerbach, Mimesis
- Marshal McLuhan, “Media as Translators” from Understanding Media;
- Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter;
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.”
- Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”
- Lionel Bailly, “Real, Symbolic, Imaginary”
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
- Charles Darwin, selected chapters from The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
- Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity
- Callois' Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, etc
- Diderot, "The Paradox of Acting,
- Baudelaire, Le Poison/Poison in The Flowers of Evil
- Mallarmé, "Mimique," (to which Derrida gives so much attention in "The Double Session")
- "Displays," "The Demon of Analogy," and "The Book: A Spiritual Instrument"
- Louis Aragon: Paris Peasant, especially the scene in the cane shop of the Passage de l'Opera.
- Georges Bataille, "Masks"
- Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University Press, 1981.
- Roger Caillois, The Language of Stones, a Theory of Masks.
- Maurice Blanchot, "The Two Versions of the Imaginary," "The Gaze of Orpheus"
- Lacan, "Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function I," as well as at least a selection from his doctoral thesis "‘Paranoid psychosis and its relation to the personality" (there is a very important section entitled the The Case of Aimée)
- Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia"
- Adorno, "The Idea of Natural History," "Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment," "Autonomy" in Aesthetic Theory
- Ernst Bloch: "Wishful Image in the Dance, Pantomime and Filmland" from The Principle of Hope
- Aby Warburg: on the "Pathos Formula," read in Warburg's fragments and unfinished notes Published and interpreted by Gombrich in Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography
- Barthes: "Myth Today" (especially the section on "re-mythifying myth")
- Homi Bhabha: "Of Mimicry and Man" from The Location of Culture
- Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things
- Agamben: "This Nameless Science," and "Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's films,"
- Brecht
- Artaud: The Theatre and Its Double
Yay! I'm so excited!! We can't forget to add the Ricouer, and I'll try to drum up some other ballers to join in on this schizzo-copy-shindig!!
ReplyDeleteYes, the Ricouer! What's the title? We'll add it. Also, what are your thoughts on the week by week breakdown?
ReplyDeleteReally, I want to strike the week structure and give each text it's own week--which would essentially extend the conversation out like a year. This would allow new additions, would obviate "life pressure", etc. Might allow deeper reading and deeper discussion of each text in context, as opposed to the galloping through everything (which, admittedly, was the original idea.)
Should we add in any natural biology? Maybe there's a good David Attenborough documentary in the PBS archive...