REL 280(S) Story-telling: The Experience

This course will examine the meaning and function of "experience"(aesthetic, religious and/or mystical, and sexual) in various modes of storytelling. Does experience have a history? How is a claim made, how is a story told, from experience and-assuming it can be read-how is experience to be read? What are the presuppositions carried by the notion of experience in regard to truth and fiction, authorship, subjectivity, and possession ("It's my experience and I'll tell it if I want to . . ." would the song have gone). What does one narrate when articulating such experience, what kind of story-or history-is it and is a story of one's own? What is the relationship between the story and the teller? If the storyteller and the author are indeed disappearing, as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault have claimed, what does it mean to speak of an experience and of a story of one's own? What can be learned from different modes of storytelling and what qualifies as storytelling? We will read texts by Michel de Certeau, Martin Heidegger, William James, Immanuel Kant, Gershom Scholem, Virginia Woolf, and Kateb Yacine in an effort to think critically about the language of experience, and to address the effects and value of experience's disappearance. Readings will also include Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Joan Scott, "Experience," Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Requirements: full attendance and participation, written comments on weekly readings, leading of class discussion (twice over the course of the semester), two papers. Lecture and discussion. Open to all classes without prerequisite.

Hour: ANIDJAR