Three topics are offered 2008-2009. Students may take one or all three for credit. Fall 2008: Section A1 Book Work. How do versions and editions of literary works matter? We will study books as material bearers of meaning, focusing on textual criticism, bibliography, aesthetics, media and transmission, editorial intervention, and cultural legacy. Emphasis on 19th-century literature. Section B1: Freud & Lacan. Not the application to literature of psychoanalysis as an alien technology, but discovery that Freud’s and Lacan’s texts themselves are “in the loop.” How literature is connected to psychoanalysis and philosophy; various theoretical and literary texts. Spring 2009: Dialogue, Laughter, and the Grotesque. Philosophies and aesthetics of laughter and carnival in criticism and history, through dialogues, novels, poems, other genres. Selections from Bakhtin, Rabelais, Sterne, Byron, Dickens, Freud, Bergson, Marx Bros., Koch, others. Critiques of this tradition also.