Annotation
LITERARY THEORIES: WRITING, LITERATURE, THEORY
David Vichnar, PhD (david.vichnar@ff.cuni.cz)
Office Hours: by appointment (Room 219b);
Compulsory M.A. Course (Tue 14.10-15.40); Program in Critical & Cultural Theory;
Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (Room 304)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This year's course will examine the intersection between writing, literature & theory in the work of Derrida, Ranciere, Kristeva, Barthes, Cixous, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, & Sartre.
"Who can write? What can writing do? We sense that the advanced) form of these questions can be, already on its own, diverted. It harbours a ruse, of writing, and this is not accidental. What would it divert from? Fostering the belief that writing befalls power (one can, in general, and one can write if occasioned to), that it can ally itself to power, can prolong it by complementing it, or can serve it, the question suggests that writing can come [arriver] to power or power to writing. It excludes in advance the identification of writing *as* power or the recognition of power from the onset of writing. It auxiliarizes and hence aims to conceal the fact that writing and power never work separately, however complex the laws, the system, or the links of their collusion may be. Now what is astonishing is not writing's power but what comes, as if from within structure, to limit it by a powerlessness or an effacement." [Derrida, "Scribble (writing-power")]
MOODLE LINK TO SYLLABUS & ALL READINGS: https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=1253