Making Sense: Real Poetics, Diderot through Freud

Subject associations
COM 447
Term
Fall 2020
Instructors
Claudia Joan Brodsky
Registrar description
As Hegel, most discursive philosophers, and every poet demonstrate, "sense" is a uniquely complex, necessarily temporal thing, as divorced from organic replication and animal mimicry as curiosity and history from transmissible illness or the concept of violence from violence itself. In this course we study primary modes of signification- from acts of indirection and association Freud called "detours" to "formal" delineations and transpositions of "content"--in which literary, cognitive and aesthetic sense are made. Works by Diderot, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Wordsworth, Saussure, Freud among those we read. Open to all undergrad and grad students.