Literature
DIRECTOR
Associate Professor Osborn
The philosophic character of literary study within the Institute is reflected in a concentration upon major authors whose work can claim philosophical scope and penetration. The approach to these works is also philosophic. Students inquire into the issues treated by great writers considering the literary treatment as one voice in a conversation within which philosophers, theologians and political thinkers also participate. The poet seeks to supplant opinion with knowledge by means of constructing a coherent vision of reality just as the philosopher seeks the same end through dialectic. The aim of study therefore is to share in the poet’s wisdom concerning a reality already constituted before imagination sets to work on it but imperfectly known until illuminated and ordered by art. Courses focus upon literature as a distinct way of knowing irreducible to other modes of knowledge but best understood and assessed when studied in company with other modes of discourse directed to common subjects. Institute students join teachers dedicated to grasping in what manner poetic art can provide knowledge of reality and to discerning what that knowledge may be.
Students learn to apprehend the form of literary art by attending to the qualities of poetic speech and by studying the kinds of poetry. They investigate such constants of the arts as myth, symbol, analogy and figure, image, prosody and style. In the process they come to appreciate the notable congruence of particularity with generality that characterizes the poetic mode of being and that has led thinkers to define a poem as a "concrete universal." The kinds of poetry — the perennial genres — need not be taken as prescriptions arbitrarily imposed, for they can be understood as the natural shapes literature displays when it envisions different human actions.
Neither the constants of poetic speech nor the continuities of genre sufficiently specify the particular purchase upon human issues offered by any great poem. To bring this meaning into sharper resolution requires the final act of literary understanding, interpretation of individual poems, an undertaking in which the comparison of poem with poem has its instructive part. Critical interpretation entails the most careful and sustained attentiveness to elucidating meaning and culminates in critical judgment of the contribution of that meaning to one’s grasp of the truth.
The interpretive dimension of the program is reflected in courses that find their formal object sometimes in a genre (Epic, Lyric, Tragedy/Comedy, Menippean Satire, or Russian Novel), sometimes in a literary movement (Renaissance Drama, Romantic/Victorian Literature, Augustan Literature, American Literature, Southern Literature, Twentieth Century Literature), sometimes in major authors (Dante, Chaucer, Spenser/Milton, Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Faulkner, Hawthorne/Melville/James). Students confront the claims of classical, Christian and modern poets. They thereby enter into the issues that cause the Western tradition to be a tradition of controversies.
Courses in Literature
ENG 8310-15: Special Topic Seminars. Focused, intense examination of a subject in a small seminar setting for advanced doctoral students. Courses might be organized by author, subject, theme, history, or other structure, and may involve intense research, writing, and presentation. IPS students only.