COML 6766

Headless: George Bataille and Friends

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

This seminar will explore major works of avant-garde literature from the interwar and immediate postwar periods, with the work of George Bataille and his major collaborators and sometime antagonists (André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, Rogert Caillois, Marcel Mauss) were all concerned in different ways with the displacement of a purportedly unified, rational consciousness by a "headless" subject, whose advent was heralded most directly by the journal Acéphale (co-edited by Bataille and Klossowski) in the mid-1930's, but which was also implicit in the multiform engagements of avante-garde authors with the work of Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, in the surrealists' experiments with formal constraints, and in the subjective "dissolution" explored in different ways by Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski.  In addition to key literary texts, we will also examine paintings and photography from the period and critical essays.

When Offered Spring.

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