REL 306 (formerly 280) Story-Telling: The Experience (Not offered 1999-2000)

If to tell a story is to report an experience, then telling of an experience will be akin to telling a story. Rephrasing this in a Lacanian turn of phrase, we could say that experience is structured like a story. This is what this course will do, then: read "experience" as story; the story of experience. We will examine the meaning and function of experience (touching upon biographical, philosophical, aesthetic, religious and/or mystical, and sexual "experiences") in its relation (as when one relates a story) to story-telling. "Story-telling" as such is therefore not the subject of the class. The possibilities and modalities of telling "experience" are. Does experience have a history? What relation to time does it articulate? 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 telling? What qualifies as story-telling? We will read texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and others, in an effort to think critically about the language of experience, and to address the effects and value of experience's disappearance. Class format: lecture and discussion. Requirements: full attendance and participation, written comments on weekly readings, leading of class discussion (twice over the course of the semester), two papers. Open to all classes without prerequisite.