Antibourgeois sentiment from Baudelaire to Burroughs

elective seminars
general courses

Passive knowledge of the English language

Classroom

During the course we are going to discuss the chosen texts expressing critique of the bourgeois form of life.

Bourgeoisie is not just an economic category. It is a concept referring to a certain form of life and mode of subjectivation. This bourgeois form of life and subjectivity has been provoking, from the beginning, a radical opposition (from without, on the part of aristocracy or proletariat, but also, which will be of interest to us, from within or on the boundaries of the bourgeois world). During the seminar we are going to discuss the chosen (mostly literary) texts expressing this radical antibourgeois sentiment whose articulation is closely linked to the processes and events that shaped the bourgeois ethos itself. The latter changed, within certain limits, along the evolution of the capitalist modernity, but it also took particular forms in different cultural contexts. For that reason, we are going to examine the antibourgeois sentiment both in its diachronic dimension and moving from one such context to another. Adopting a philosophical perspective and examining the most important motives of antibourgeois rebellions (linked i.a. to the questions of creativity, sexuality, family or community), we will try to investigate their expressions in three distinguished constellations: France in the second half of the 19th century (with its classical bourgeois world and repressed revolutions), Austria and Germany in the first half of the 20th century (with its radical political movements and intellectual ferment) and finally post-war America (with its middle class and the demons of the cold war). It is in these constellations that the antibourgeois affect took the most interesting forms, allying with forces that were not always liberating.

Primary literature (fragments):

Ch. Baudelaire, Malarz życia codziennego, Sztuczne raje, Paryski spleen

A. Rimbaud, Sezon w piekle, Ja to ktoś inny

E. Junger, Publicystyka polityczna, O bólu, Robotnik

W. Reich, Sexual Revolution, Funkcja orgazmu, Listen, Little Man!

H. Miller, Zwrotnik Raka, Klimatyzowany koszmar, Big Sur

D. di Prima, Wspomnienia bitniczki

J. Kerouac, W drodze

A. Ginsberg, Skowyt, Deliberate Prose

T. Leary, Polityka ekstazy

T. Wolfe, Próba kwasu w elektrycznej oranżadzie

H.S. Thompson, Hells Angels. Anioły piekieł, Songs of the Doomed

W.S. Burroughs, Nagi lunch, The Limits of Control, The Burroughs file

Selected secondary literature

T.W. Adorno, Osobowość autorytarna

W. Benjamin, Paryż II Cesarstwa u Baudelaire’a

W. Benjamin, Pasaże

M. Ecksteins, Święto wiosny. Wielka Wojna i narodziny nowego wieku

B. Friedan, Mistyka kobiecości

E. Hobsbawm, Wiek kapitału

J. Jarniewicz, Bunt wizjonerów

K. Millet, Sexual Politics

C.W. Mills, Białe kołnierzyki. Amerykańskie klasy średnie

P. Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider

J. Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930

J. Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life. Society, Politics and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750

K. Theweleit, Męskie fantazje

T. Miller, The 60s Communes. Hippies and Beyond

Acquired knowledge:

- students will be familiar with the most important forms of antibourgeois sentiment in the chosen historical and cultural contexts

- students will be aware of the chosen norms that constitute and regulate social structures and institutions, and able to identify the sources of these norms, their nature and many ways they influence human behaviour

Acquired skills:

- students will read and interpret selected literary texts from philosophical perspective, investigating the transformations of the modern bourgeois ethos and the forms of its critique

- students will be able to identify links between the formation of ideas and social/cultural processes

Acquired social competence:

- students will be aware of the range of knowledge they acquired and understand the need for continual education

- students will be open to new ideas and ready to change their views in the light of available data and arguments

Grading will be based on presentations or essays. Presentations should elaborate the problematic discussed during particular meetings by deepening it and referring to additional sources. Essays should contain well thought out, coherent and informed elaborations of the chosen aspects of the course’s problematic.

Permissible number of absences: 4