Comparative Literature 220 - COLQ: IMAGINING LANGUAGE

This course explores the ways in which philosophers and artists have imagined the links between language and the world. We read mostly pre-20th century theories of language—Plato’s Cratylus, St. Augustine’s On the Teacher, Locke on language from the Essay, Herder and Rousseau on The Origin of Language, Freud on jokes—and link them to novels, poems and other artwork by (mostly) 20th-century artists such as Louis Zukofsky, May Swenson, Lewis Carroll, Richard Powers, Xu Bing, Russell Hoban and others who focus on the materiality of language, on words as things. Readings are accompanied by weekly exercises such as rebuses, invented etymologies, alphabet poems, portmanteau words, emoticons and so on.