LIT 6934 | Patricia Craddock

ENL 6934 Literature of Knowledge and Power

Craddock F6-8 TUR 2341

According to Thomas DeQuincy, texts can be divided into two categories, “Literature of Knowledge” and “Literature of Power.” “Literature of Knowledge” is a piece of writing that seeks to be a transparent medium through which skills and information are transferred from the writer to the reader. It gains its authority from its (apparent) reliability in representing the world of phenomena–anything from recipes and telephone books to historical analyses and scientific articles. It succeeds best when it is transitory–when it generates successors that surpass it. It is designed to become obsolete. “Literature of Power,” on the other hand, creates its authority by creating the world it represents. It cannot be falsified by appeals to the phenomenal world, but only by internal weaknesses and inconsistencies. It includes all or most of the texts in the genres of poetry, drama, and prose fiction, withsome essays, dialogues, orations, and the like.

Such distinctions, though often taken for granted in practice, have recently come under theoretical attack from various directions. They would also have seemed wrong to virtually all writers prior to the nineteenth century, and to many of DeQuincy’s contemporaries. Many of the greatest works in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, and some in the twentieth as well, are written in genres DeQuincy would presumably have dismissed as mere “literature of knowledge”–journalism, biography and autobiography, history, natural history, political argument, travel accounts, and literary criticism. While the modern approach might argue that the virtues DeQuincy sees as occurring separately do not occur at all, we will explore the eighteenth-century proposition that writers in these and similar genres can and do achieve both sets of virtues. We will examine some of the great nonfictional texts of the last 200-300 years in their own terms and in the terms of late twentieth-centry critiques of the claims of representation and detachment.

Possible authors:

18th century: Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds, Piozzi, Barbauld, Wollstonecraft, White, Burke, Defoe, Swift, Astell, Addison, Dryden, Locke, Hume
19th and 20th centuries: Woolf, James, Woodham-Smith, Mill, Ruskin, Martineau, Darwin, Eddings, Russell, Shaw

Syllabus

LIT6934 Literature of Knowledge and Power

Meeting One: What do we do? Assignments: DeQuincey, Barthes, Mink

Plan of Course

Kinds of Understanding (Mink)
Worlds to Consider:
Tools (and see Barthes)

“Professional Conferences” (imaginary, but then what is real?)
- Life Studies: “power” and “knowledge” in works portraying human lives, human history, human societies, human institutions: Meeting 7 (Feb. 20)
- Natural Impressions: “power” and “knowledge” in works portraying the “natural” world (the world of physical and biological/zoological/botantical phenomena not entirely controlled by human actions) and/or works of art in relation to the natural world: Meeting 11 (Mar. 27)
- Maps, Diagrams, and Paradigms: “power” and “knowledge” in works portraying analytical schema porporting to describe and/or explain something about the phenomenal or noumenal world(s):Meeting 14 (April 17)

GENERAL TOPICS for particular meetings

1-9 Introduction
1-16 Biography : Johnson, Life of Richard Savage; Boswell, Life of Johnson; Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson; Hopkins, “Felix Randall,” Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”; Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
1-23 History: Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why; Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
1-30 Travel and Journalism
2-6 Autobiography
2-13 Diaries and Letters, Meditations and Prayers
2-20 CONFERENCE
2-27 Natural History
3-6 Case Histories (anthropology, archaeology, sociology, religion, politics)
3-20 “Practical” (Applied) Criticism
3-27 CONFERENCE
4-3 Philosophy, “Theory”
4-10 Economics, Theology, Political Science
4-17 CONFERENCE

-Introduction: Theoretical texts