LITERATURE AS METHOD AND MADNESS in Fall 2021 (CL1099FB 2)

Seeing a literary text as a “system” with its own “rules” is one of the major developments in contemporary literary criticism. But do literary architectures have their limits? What happens when we push these conventions to the extreme? We will investigate the supernatural in Russian fairy tales, mind-bending paradoxes in Zen poetry, cubist juxtapositions in French literature as well as Alice in Wonderland, where mathematical logic and madness run wild.