3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

How can we become better readers of the signs and symptoms that texts, as well as minds and bodies, address to us? An eminent figure of European intellectual life, deeply versed in the world of the arts and of medicine, Jean Starobinski will guide us through this inquiry. With his seminal work Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction as our focus, we will learn why the ideas of this modern humanist have had such a wide-ranging influence on twentieth-century conceptions of subjectivity, interiority, imagination, and illness (e.g. nostalgia, melancholia, paranoia). We will also learn through his work on Rousseau, why Starobinski’s groundbreaking ideas about writing (l’écriture) shaped some of the major debates of French theory. This course is taught in English. For graduate students, reading knowledge of French is desirable. Next to Transparency and Obstruction, readings involve selections from Starobinski’s essays and from Rousseau. No exams, but a short oral presentation and a final essay.