200 - Narrative, Psychoanalysis, and the Human Subject
Susan Derwin
Tuesday 1:00-4:00PM, Phelps 6320, Enroll: 54908
The perennial announcement of the death of psychoanalysis is a sign that it is alive and well. Indeed, psychoanalysis remains a crucial interpretative practice for the study of narrative as it reflects formations of the human subject and as it serves as an instrument of this formation. This course explores principles first elaborated by Freud that have undergone critical readings and revisions by subsequent thinkers who have engaged seriously with Freud’s writings. The concepts we will focus on have been selected in view of their capacity to articulate the relationship between patterns and complexities of narrative and of human identity. These concepts include: projection, identification, ambivalence, the gaze, the primal scene, mourning and melancholia. Readings from Abraham and Torok, Freud, Lacan, Laplanche and Pontalis, and S.Weber.

200 - Giles Deleuze’s Time Machine
Colin Gardner
Thursday 6:30-9:15PM, Arts 1340, Enroll: 55335
This course will focus exclusively on the film theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Through screenings of films by, among others, Vigo, Antonioni, Losey, Ford, Welles and Rossellini, alongside readings of Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image, the class will explore Deleuze’s notion, derived from Henri Bergson and C.S. Pierce, of cinema as a composition of images and non-semiological signs. The first half of the course will deal with the pre-World War II predominance of movement in the film image, where time is treated indirectly, the second half the post-war domination of time as a direct-image. The result will enable us to develop a fuller understanding of Deleuze’s ontology of difference-as-becoming and its roots in Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche.
COURSE SYLLABUS IS AVAILABLE–please request from sierra@gss.ucsb.edu.

200 - Science and Literature: Cooperative models of complexity
Noelle Batt
Thursday 3:00-5:50PM, Phelps 5313, Enroll: 49668
Starting from what writers, semioticians or philosophers such as Paul Valéry, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iouri Lotman, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, Cornelius Castoriadis, Gorgio Agamben, Laurent Jenny and others have to say about the complexity of the literary text, we shall confront their statements to scientific theories elaborated by mathematicians, physicists and neuro-biologists to modelize the complex forms or systems of Nature (including the human brain) : fractals, chaos theory, theories concerning the emergence of consciousness. The general idea of the seminar is to trace down and represent the compositional dynamics of the « artistic text ».

Bibliography (to be completed) :
Literature :
Paul Valéry (« Poésie et pensée abstraite » in ?uvres), T.S. Eliot (« The Music of Poetry » in On Poetry and Poets, I.A. Richards (« The Interactions of Words » in Allen Tate (ed.), The Language of Poetry), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Le Visible et l’invisible, Résumés de cours, La Prose du monde) , Iouri Lotman (The Structure of the Artistic text), Roman Jakobson (« Linguistique et poétique » in Problèmes de linguistique générale), Umberto Eco (The Open Work), Cornelius Castoriadis (« Notes sur quelques moyens de la poésie » in Figures du pensable, Gorgio Agamben (Stanze), Laurent Jenny (La Parole singulière), Gilles Deleuze (Third part of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?)

Science :
G. Mandelbrot (fractals, A Fractal Geometry of Nature), Briggs and Peat (chaos theory, A Turbulent Mirror), Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky (broken symmetry, Fearful Symmetry), Gerald Edelman (the emergence of consciousness, Wider than the Sky)