Professor Katherine Arens ([email protected])GER 382N (Unique # 35540); Spring, 2005; MW 1230 to 2p EPS 4.102ACOURSE TITLE: Can(n)on Fodder: Case Studies in Textual AfterlivesOFFICE: E. P. Schoch 3.128COURSE DESCRIPTION:This course focuses on the politics of the "Canon" of great texts, as definedthrough the material processes and ideologies that have defined "canonicity" at variousmoments of history. Each era has defined its "classic" or "canonical" authors differently;these authors themselves were often at pains to portray themselves as classic orhegemonic authors; literary histories, critics, prize boards, institutions, publishinghouses, translators and editors contributed to "becoming canonical" in other ways.This course will allow students from any national literature or cultural studies towork out their own "case studies" through the course of the semester, while reflectingon what having "great works" means to a culture, its identity, and its politics. Eachstudent will pick an author to use during the term, and them will work through a set oftheoretical and practical issues surrounding that author. Each week, a theory questionwill be posed, along with readings in aspects of cultural and literary history and criticism;each week, students will post/discuss the results of their own preliminary investigationsin that field/for their chosen author as part of an electronic works-in-progress seminar. Approximate order of topics:1) Identifying a Canonical figure: finding one and finding out why canonical?2) Aesthetics as legitimization for canonicity3) "The Order of Books": Chartier and how texts are used, circulated, and valued4) Printing and Publishing: how the material form of the book influences prestige and content5) Libraries, Archives, Collections, Performances, and Catalogues: Ownership,status, and social prestige6) Genres and Text-Types: Problems in Interdisciplinarity7) Institutional Hegemonies: PEN, Harvard, etc. 8) Books in Trade: Literary histories, Anthologies, Editions, Translations9) Media, Publicity, Fads, Scandal: Selling the Author in the Public Sphere10) The Prize and Reviewing Rackets11) Ghosts in the Machines: Online, Onscreens, and in PixelsThis course will be of interest to anyone working on (cross-)cultural contact, on thesociology of literature, on (counter-)hegemonic cultural practices, and on culturalidentity politics. IT IS NOT SPECIFIC TO ANY ONE NATIONAL LITERATURE OR LANGUAGE.ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADINGWorking in guided stages, students will develop a semester project on either the moretheoretical or the more practical side of this problem. The final paper will capitalize onthis work, by taking the form of a critical publishing, aesthetic, and reception study ofone author/work, showing how the author is reconfigured for different audiences, or astudy of how that author "performed" an identity and/or was staged in literaryhistories themselves, as history writing and as reflecting aesthetic and social ideologies.Books OrderedDavid Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader. London:Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-22658-9Anthony Grafton. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. ISBN 0-674-30760-7 (strongly recommended)Roger Chartier. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe betweenthe Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, CA:Stanford UP, 1994. ISBN 0-8047-2267-6Susan Bassnett. Translation Studies. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN