ENGL 491B

Senior Honours Seminar - Theory (3 credits)

Instructor: Miranda Burgess
Section: 002
Term: 1

Being Moved

This seminar addresses a series of related issues in the history of aesthetics—in its general form, the “science. . . of the conditions of sensuous perception” or the “theory of taste, or of the perception of the beautiful,” as the OED has it; more specifically, the philosophical, poetic, and scholarly discussion surrounding the responsiveness of readers, viewers, and hearers to art. We’ll be especially interested in the development and implications of the claim that art moves those who encounter it, an idea that is closely involved with questions of motive, agency, and subjectivity, mobility and disability, and the efficacy and worth of the emotions, as well as with the nature and worth of art itself. In the first five weeks of the course we will read excerpts from several classic works in the history of aesthetics (by Plato, Sidney, Hutchison, Hume, Burke, Kames, Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno), examining the conceptions of subjectivity, agency, and sociability developed in and across these. We will then turn to four sites of inquiry where the influence and implications of the philosophy can be examined and/ or critiqued, spending two weeks on each: the relationship between disability and aesthetic participation/ experience, the emergence of canons and popular literatures, the experience of “transport,” or being carried away by one’s reading, and the association (in psychological and literary critical writing, and, more practically, in programs in “narrative medicine”) between experiencing art, empathy, and ethics. Though we’ll pay particular attention to the written, especially the printed word, we will also explore relationships between reading and other modalities of aesthetic experience and response. Primary texts will include John Burke’s site-specific musical work Remember Your Power and John Galt’s short story “The Buried Alive”; Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gray’s “Elegy wrote in a Country Church-yard,” and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight; Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and Edgar Wright’s film Shaun of the Dead; W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.