PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.
Steve Connor (course leader) & Colin MacCabe
Nec manet sui similis res: omnia migrant, omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V. 828)
The mutability of things is a theme that remains constant from the ancient world to the modern. This course will focus closely on the changing forms in which change of form has been thought about and represented, in literature, myth, opera, film, art, science, and digital technology. The movement from form to form can be figured as a process of degeneration and regression (lycanthropy, transformations into lower forms), or a process of perfecting (alchemy, apotheosis). Metamorphosis is the vehicle by which different cultures think concretely about the relations between form and time, fusion and undoing, the singular and the multiple, the absolute and the intermediary.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.
Seminars
1. Introduction
The problem of metamorphosis.
2. Ovid Metamorphosed
This week’s class considers some modern reappropriations of the idea of metamorphosis, looking at two twentieth-century literary transformations of Ovid’s story of the metamorphic revenge taken by Dionysus.
Essential reading
* Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), ‘Pentheus and Bacchus’ Metamorphoses, III, 580-691
* Ezra Pound, Canto II, The Cantos, London: Faber and Faber, 1987
* Ted Hughes, Tales From Ovid: Twenty-Four Passages From the Metamorphoses, London: Faber, 1997
Additional reading
* Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London: Duckworth, 1999)
3. Deleuze
This class considers the rich intermingling of horror and desire in the idea of human transformation into wolf form.
Essential reading
* Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 232-309
4. Becoming Animal I: The Werewolf Myth
This class considers the rich intermingling of horror and desire in the idea of human transformation into wolf form.
Essential reading
* FILM: Neil Jordan, dir. The Company of Wolves, 1985
* Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, pp. 100-18
5. Becoming Animal II: Entomanthropy
Why has the modern world focussed on the insect as the object of such phobic dread? What are the links between the insect and the alien?
Essential reading
* Franz Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ (1916), in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961, pp. 9-63.
* FILM: David Cronenberg, dir., The Fly, 1986
Additional reading
* Marina Warner, ‘Hatching’, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Other Ways of Telling the Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 75-118
6. Against Leviticus
This final class considers the transformations of the body effected in body practices, cosmetic, ritual and sexual.
Essential reading
* John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, London: For J. Hardesty, 1650. Extracts to be supplied [more..]
* Body Modification Ezine
Additional reading
* Mike Featherstone (ed.), Body Modification, London: Sage, 2000
