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Course
Description:
M. H. Abrams established the orientations of various literary
theoretical approaches as points on a peculiar compass. There are
author-based theories, reader-based theories, text-based theories, and
theories that propose the text as imitative of the universe. For the
first part of the semester, we will read the major statements on each of
these orientations, asking what historical and material disruptions have
changed the way we think about authors, readers, texts, and the world.
Then we will take a post-structural turn, taking language itself as our
central problematic, and shifting our attention from these more
traditional categories to ones more likely to concern us today—instead
of authors and readers, we’ll read about subjectivity, instead of texts,
textuality, and instead of the universe, history. We’ll find that
between subjectivity and textuality you have the psychoanalytic and
reader-based orientation to literary criticism, between history and
textuality you have philosophical and rhetorical approaches, between
subjectivity and history, you have cultural studies, feminist, and
Marxist approaches. By the end of the course, you should be able to
situate a critical text into a context that makes it more intelligible
(that is, you’ll know what implicit questions the text is responding to
and in what frame its response makes sense), and you should have some
idea about how your natural analytical inclinations have been
systematized (that is, you’ll learn what your preferred way of reading
is called, how to do it more intentionally, and how to engage with
others who like that sort of thing as well).
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Required
Texts:
Criticism: Major Statements, 4th Ed.,
Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson, eds.
Alice
in Wonderland
(2nd ed.) ed. By Donald J. Gray, W. W. Norton & Co.
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Calendar Requirements
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