HUM 472 Readings in Contemporary European Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Full Curriculum Program Fall 2016 Semester - Prague

This seminar will be an exploration and application of the thought of French post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) & Félix Guattari (1930-1992). We will proceed roughly chronologically, beginning with Deleuze's formative years (1962-1968) writing on the three philosophers who would be key to his later work: Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza. Next, we will examine the initial period of his collaboration with Guattari (1972-1980), focusing on their interest in the writings of the avant-garde figure Antonin Artaud, and his experiments in theater and radiophony. From there we will be exploring their writings on music, and applying them specifically to American improvisatory jazz from 1945-1975 (Bebop, Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz, Hard Bop, Modal Jazz, Free Jazz, Exepermental Fusion). In the second half of the term we will explore the application of their philosophy to literature (the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Laura Riding, Emily Dickinson; the fiction of Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heinrich von Kleist and Henry James), devoting a session to Pier Paolo Pasolini as a segue between literature and cinema, and then spending the rest of the term exploring Deleuze's theory of cinema, applying it to the following film directors: Orson Welles, Alain Resnais, Philippe Garrel and Jean-Luc Godard.