English
4011: Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction—Fall
2007
Philosophy & Fiction
Brian Kiteley
● ● ●
My office: SH, 487C ● My
phone: 303-871-2898 ● Class meets: Wed 6-9:50 pm in
SH 496 ● My email: bkiteley@du.edu
NOTE: This graduate fiction workshop is
OPEN ONLY to fiction writers in the Ph.D. program in the English Department.
TEXTS: Trust,
Alphonso Lingis,
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. Here are
some new exercises for a
follow-up book to The 3 AM Epiphany
I’m writing.
ABOUT THE COURSE: Alphonso Lingis mixes travel
narrative and philosophy (and he is a very rare philosopher who uses
straightforward story (as opposed to purposely odd and playful story) to
explain and expand upon philosophy). He
practices something like philosophical travel essays, in which the travel is
inextricably linked with (or at least interrupted by) the philosophizing. In travel writing you walk or drive from one
meaning to the next. Lingis expands
dramatically on this simple method.
Stanley Cavell mixes discussion of film, literature, and philosophy,
with some beautiful discussion of Shakespeare, Henry James, and Fred
Astaire. Richard Sennett, a sociologist,
mixes an examination of work with a kind of practical or applied
philosophy. Philosophy and fiction
don’t go hand in hand, but the two can be fruitfully investigated
together. What is philosophy? Does Philosophy require narrative? Is great fiction necessarily philosophically
sophisticated? Are Melville, Stein,
Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, or DeLillo slyly philosophers? Does one need to know a philosopher’s
biography to understand his or her philosophy (does it matter, for instance,
that J.L. Austin worked for MI6 during WWII)?
My father is a philosopher, and we’ve argued this last question a
great deal over the years. In this
class, we will discuss some basic philosophical problems and the recent history
of modern philosophy. Plato and
Aristotle talked quite a bit about philosophy and poetry; we’ll update
that a bit. In your fiction, I expect
you to interweave philosophical problems somehow into your layers of narrative
fabric. Years ago, when my father first
taught philosophy at
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, as well as
a sociologist (and he has written two novels).
We’ll spend some time defining the terms of art of these
disciplines.
ASSIGNMENTS: 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. Bring these critiques to
class the day of the discussion of your classmates’ work.
I will also ask
you to write a brief essay on one of these three texts (300-500 words), which
we’ll discuss toward the end of the term.
And, of course, you’ll
write fiction in the class, your own on-going projects or new material
generated by the exercises. You will
each submit four pieces of writing during the term (as well as the one exercise
at the beginning). Your piece can be any
length, although I suggest you try to stay under 25 pages. You may submit several smaller pieces. It would be best if these works were not
completely new material, but they should also be writing that hasn’t seen
too many workshops.
BACKGROUND material on-line (you don’t have to read this stuff, but you might
want to):
What is phenomenology? What is analytic philosophy? What are the differences between
the two (also called Continental philosophy and linguistic philosophy)? Here is the entire text of How to Do Things with Words, by J.L. Austin, and Henry
James’s stories “The Jolly Corner”
and “The Birthplace”
(click on “text (HTML)”), which are all central to the chapters
we’ll be reading in Cavell.