COML 6175 - Literal Meaning

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with COML 4175.

A. Traisnel.

The common misuse of the adverb “literally” to describe figurative situations seems symptomatic of our cultural moment. How has the literal, which etymologically refers to the letter, come to be associated with truth, authenticity, and honesty-indeed with the very opposite of the literary? We will track the changing valences of letters and their relationship to meaning, from scholastic debates about the literal interpretation of the Scriptures to early-modern discussions of the nature of the alphabet, from Saussurian linguistics to twentieth-century philosophies of language, and from the modernist experiments on the materiality of language to the use of algebra in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. We will read thinkers such as: Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Rimbaud, Stein, Apollinaire, Ponge, Borges, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, and Eco.