82363 ENGL 4700 MW 9.30-10.45a PSC-152
This section of ENGL 4700 will examine literary theory from its poetic and rhetorical beginnings, through hermeneutics, philology, and romanticism to contemporary theoretical and critical discourses about literary studies.
This course is about the idea of what we characterize as literary discourse and its place in temporal cultural matters. Our journey will be a linear tracing through history of thinking about literature as art, symbol, rhetoric, psychology, self-referent, and thing-in-itself.
Our survey will spend about half of the semester before the twentieth century and half after. We’ll begin with the classic texts, from the poetic and rhetorical theories of the Greeks and Romans, their development into medieval hermeneutics, through Renaissance humanism, Romanticism, and modern New Criticism. Part two of the course will examine late modern and contemporary trends in literary theory and criticism, like Formalism, (Post-)Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Feminism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and other slippery liminal areas.
Much of what we read — if not all — will be challenging and often frustrating. Our approach will attempt to engage the texts in the capacity that we are ready for. We will conduct our meetings as seminars in which we attempt to tease out meaning and significance toward a better understanding of both literature and the theoretical discourse that surrounds, supports, and/or deconstructs it.
Detailed Reading Schedule
08/24 – Plato from The Republic (30-38); “Ion” (38-46)
08/26 – Plato from “Phaedrus” (46-49) and Tolstoy from What Is Art? (50-54)
08/31 – Aristotle from Poetics (59-81)
09/02 – Horace “The Art of Poetry” (82-94)
09/07 – Labor Day, no class
09/09 – Longinus from “On the Sublime” (95-108); Plotinus “On the Intellectual Beauty” (109-119)
09/14 – Augustine from Confessions (download PDF)
09/16 – Pope “Essay on Criticism” (198-209)
09/21 – Hume “On the Standard of Taste” (231-245)
09/23 – Wordsworth Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (306-318)
09/28 – Shelley “A Defense of Poetry” (344-364)
09/30 – Hegel “Intro to the Philosophy of Art” (473-483)
10/05 – Arnold “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (415-428)
10/07 – Library Day, no class
10/12 – Freud “The Dream-Work” (500)
10/14 – Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (537)
10/19 – Leavis “The Great Tradition” (652)
10/21 – Richards from Principle of Literary Criticism (764)
10/26 – Saussure “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” and “Binary Oppositions” (842)
10/28 – Foucault “What Is an Author?” (904); Derrida “Structure, Sign, and Play” (915)
11/02 – Lacan “The Mirror Stage” (1123) and “The Meaning of the Phallus” (1149)
11/04 – Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1172)
11/09 – Gilbert and Gubar from Infection in the Sentence (1532)
11/11 – Kristeva “Women’s Time” (1563); Butler “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1707)
11/16 – White “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1384)
11/18 – Certeau “Walking in the City” (1342)
11/23 – Morrison from Playing in the Dark (1791)
11/25 – Turkey Day, No class
11/30 – Lyotard “Defining the Postmodernism” (1933) (Optional); Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1966)
12/02 – Review for Final
12/09 – Final Exam, 10:30a-12:30p
