Topic for Fall: "The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy"

This course will examine, in historical and thematic fashion, how poetry and philosophy have competed, quarreled, and engaged with one another for over 2000 years. We'll begin by looking at what gave rise to the "quarrel" in Greece, most notoriously in Plato's famous attack on the poets in the last book of the Republic. This will entail asking about the origins of Greek poetry in the oral tradition from which Homer emerged, as well as about how the activity we call "philosophy" came into being.

There will be some attention to medieval notions and examples of poetry in light of the philosophical claims that lie at the center of theological thought of the time. But our next substantial historical stop will be in the Renaissance, and we'll attend to the exuberant flourishing of notions about the meaning, and implicit claims, of poetry-and what "philosophy" meant, and was thought to "say." We'll look at Sidney's Apology for Poetry, as well as related essays by his contemporaries, and a few continental literary theorists.

The course will next try to make sense of the enormous changes in the cultural status of poets, authors, and poetry in the period running from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. This will entail making sense of the crucial role of Samuel Johnson in defining the modern world of letters, as well as the large claims of Romantics like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. We'll briefly, but necessarily, consider the astringent idealism of the philosopher Kant, who had some very interesting and peculiar things to say about art, including literary art, in his third Critique (Critique of Judgment). And we'll look at how Kantian "disinterestedness" makes a distinctly English reappearance in the literary and critical essays of Matthew Arnold.

The course will conclude with a sustained consideration of the argument of the contemporary critic and theorist, Mark Edmundson, whose book, Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida. A Defense of Poetry, was the inspiration for this course. Edmundson makes extemely important claims about the contemporary study of literature, and how versions of this study reenact various moments in the long quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

Course prerequisites: though there are no formal prerequisites for the course, some upper-level literary study or work in philosophy will be helpful. What is most needed is a willingness to read patiently through texts both various and intellectually demanding in nature.

There will be two longer essays in the course, as well as several briefer essays reflecting on some of the more important texts on the syllabus. There will be no mid-term or final examination.

Students wishing to get a start on the reading for the course might begin with the final book of Plato's Republic, and Eric Havelock's scholarly masterpiece, Preface to Plato.