FREN 2190M The Literary Theory of Barthes and Derrida

W 3-5:30 Location  Page-Robinson Hall 501

Barthes and Derrida developed their reputations as thinkers along very different tracks: Barthes from a literary and rhetorical perspective, Derrida within the philosophical tradition. Both posed persistently and explicitly the question of literature. For Barthes, this involved putting literary texts to the test of new forms of analysis based on structuralist and semiological research, while arguing for a discipline that exposed “the place and energy of the [reading] subject.” Derrida often used literature to challenge traditional philosophy, and play a double-agent role within his sense of “writing,” while also analyzing its resources on their own terms, revealing criticism’s lack of both rigor and adventure, and relating literary questions to high stakes political and ethical questions. We will study a representative series of texts by Barthes and Derrida that continue to provide important models for a critical approach to literary writing.

FREN 2610G Faces: From Masks to Deepfake (HMAN 2401Y)

T 1:00-3:30 Location Andrews House 310

What is a face? Faces are generally considered unique to the being they belong to — usually a human being, since animals tend to be denied access to faciality. Indeed, face, understood as singularity, is for Emmanuel Levinas what grounds the ethical relation to the other. But faces, as deepfakes have shown, are also utterly replicable: they can be grafted, mimicked, appropriated, forged. Our collaborative humanities seminar will delve into the representations of faces (portraits, self-portraits, selfies, close-ups), the classification of faces (Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy, the iconography of hysteria, Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man), the staging of faces (pornography), the racial politics of faces (Blackface, facial recognition, Frantz Fanon’s notion of mask), and the philosophy of “faceity” (Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben).

Peter Szendy

Laura Odello