A graduate fiction workshop I taught in 2007
TEXTS: Trust, Alphonso Lingis, University of Minnesota Press; The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett, W. W. Norton & Company; Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Stanley Cavell, Belknap Press; The 3 AM Epiphany, Brian Kiteley, Writer's Digest Books; How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin (available here on-line, but you may prefer to buy a copy of the book).
ABOUT THE EXERCISES: I’ll ask you to write a handful of the exercises from The 3 AM Epiphany during the term. We will also discuss the book as a teaching device.
ABOUT THE COURSE: Alphonso Lingis mixes travel narrative and philosophy (and he is a very rare philosopher who uses story to explain and expand upon philosophy). Stanley Cavell mixes discussion of film, literature, and philosophy. Richard Sennett, a sociologist, mixes an examination of work with a kind of practical philosophy. J. L. Austin’s unprepossessing little book How to Do Things with Words will be behind a good deal of our discussion, which will necessarily be amateur philosophizing (and it might be useful to note how much of a touchstone Austin’s text was for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). Philosophy and fiction don’t go hand in hand, but the two can be fruitfully investigated together. Does Philosophy require narrative? Is great fiction necessarily philosophically sophisticated? Does one need to know a philosopher’s biography to understand his or her philosophy (does it matter, for instance, that Austin worked for MI6 during WWII)? My father, a philosopher, and I argued this last question a great deal over the years. We will discuss some basic philosophical problems, the recent history of modern philosophy. We’ll also do some simple research into the biographies of philosophers. Plato and Aristotle talked quite a bit about philosophy and poetry; we’ll update that a bit. Don’t worry—this will be a low-to-the-ground conversation. In your fiction, I expect you to interweave philosophy somehow into your layers of narrative fabric. Years ago, when my father first began teaching at San Jose State University, he ordered J. L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. The bookstore bought Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility instead. He made do, as we will.
If you’re interested, Lingis is something of a phenomenologist and he spent his early career translating the great European philosophers Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. Cavell is an aesthetic philosopher, sometimes allied with the Angl0-American analytic philosophers, though he also seems to distance himself from them. Sennett is a historian of thought. And Austin is a renegade against analytic or linguistic philosophy, despite having been very much in their camp. We’ll spend good deal of time defining these terms.
You are each responsible for two 300-word critiques of each others’ work—meaning, you’ll write a critique of everybody’s work twice (of the three or four sets of writing everyone is producing). Give me a copy of these critiques.
Here is a nice key to J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (gathered by Warren Hedges).