English 607.40 - Nietzsche, Literature, and Literary Theory
Instructor: Dr. Lorraine Markotic
Wednesday, 14:00 - 16:30
Mail to: lmarkoti [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Course Description
This course will focus on Nietzsche's importance for literature and literary theory. Nietzsche is probably the single most influential thinker on Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. His importance for deconstruction and deconstructionist literary criticism is unequival. The course will study Nietzsche's writings for their contemporary significance.
The course will begin by examining Nietzsche's early unpublished works on truth and metaphor, and his theory of tragedy. Next, two works from his middle period will be examined, with particular attention paid to his style. Subsequently, we shall study the work that he wrote in novel form: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The second half of the course will examine secondary sources on Nietzsche, including the recent wave of feminist interest in Nietzsche and in his concept of the "feminine;" it also may include some novels on Nietzsche's life. The texts chosen for the second half of the course will be determined together with students.
Likely Texts:
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s.
--- The Birth of Tragedy
--- Beyond Good and Evil
--- The Gay Science
--- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Style
Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and Metaphor
Burgard, Peter J, Ed. Nietzsche and the Feminine
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature
Yalom, Irvin D. When Nietzsche Wept (a novel)Â
Krell, David Farell. Nietzsche. A Novel
If any of the books below coincide with the specific interests of any of the students, we may agree to study one or two of them during the last few classes:
Donadio, Stephen. Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will
Foster, John Burt. Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzsche Current in Literary Modernism
Knonagel, Axel. Nietzsche Philosophy in the Works of Frederick Philip Grove.
Legget, B.J. Early Steven: The Nietzschean Intertext.
Linberg, Kathryne V. Reading Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche.
Milton, Colin. Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence
Oppel, Frances Nesbitt. Mask and Tragedy: Yeats and Nietzsche, 1902-1910.
Gooding-Williams, Robert, et al. Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism
Warner, William Beatty. Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet
Current work in the Area
Chapters in Edited Books:
"Nietzsche, the Gift, and the Feminine" in Women and the Gift, Ed. Morny Joy. Evanston: Northwestern. Forthcoming.
Articles in Refereed Journals:
"Art and the Uebermensch in Nietzsche." New Nietzsche Studies. Forthcoming.
"Transformative Consequences." Nietzsche-Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch fUUUr die Nietzsche Forschung [Nietzsche-Studies: International Yearbook for Nietzsche Research - publishes articles in English, French, and German]. Volume 27 (1998): 339-65. Berlin.
"Lou Andreas-Salomés Deutung der Beziehung von künstlerischem Schaffen und "Ãœbermensch" bei Nietzsche " [Lou Andreas-Salomé's Interpretation of the Relationship between Nietzsche's Concept of Creativity and his Notion of a Suprahuman Being [Ãœbermensch]." Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44 (1996) 6: 1039-53. Berlin.
Conference Papers:
"Nietzsche and Generosity." Paper presented at the 58th annual Northwest Philosophy Conference held in Portland, Oregon, November 4-5th, 2006.
"Another Form of Strength: Nietzsche's Magnanimity." Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for European Philosophy (SEP). September 8-10, 2005. Reading, England.
"Nietzsche's Suprahuman Aesthetic." Paper presented at the Beijing Conference on Nietzsche and Heidegger. September 25, 2002. Beijing, China.
Teaching:
Graduate:
Nietzsche, Literature, and Literary Theory (ENGL 607 / PHIL 601)
German Philosophers on Subjectivity and History (Nietzsche was a major figure in this grad course)
Nietzsche's Ethics (Independent Study course for a graduate student)
Undergraduate:
Nietzsche and Literary Theory (ENGL 517 / PHIL 589)
Nietzsche (Independent Study course for a fourth year student)
