English 382 1M3WA
Professor David Richter
Literary Criticism
Spring 2006
Syllabus
Required Text: David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition
(Second Edition: Bedford
Books of St. Martin's Press, 1998; note edition; the dust jacket is
GREEN). The book has been ordered from
the QC Bookstore.
Tentative Schedule
In general: Please read the introductions to Formalisms, etc., for the
appropriate weeks of class. This should
go without saying but….
January 30, 2006: Introduction to the
course. An orientation lecture on the varieties
of literary criticism from antiquity through the nineteenth century. Please read as background a.s.a.p. the
General Introduction to the textbook and Wayne C. Booth: "Pluralism and
Its Rivals" (786).
February 1: Twentieth Century
Formalism: New Criticism
Cleanth Brooks: "Irony as a Principle of Structure" (758)
T.S. Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (498)
February 6:
Wimsatt and Beardsley: "The Intentional Fallacy" (749)
William Empson: Epilogue to Seven
Types of Ambiguity (736)
February 8:
Twentieth Century Formalism II: Russian Formalism;
Victor Shklovsky: "Art as Technique" (717)
Yuri Tynyanov: "On Literary Evolution" (727)
February 15:
R.S. Crane: Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Structure (766)
James Phelan: "Narrative as Rhetoric" (796)
February 21: Structuralism and
Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure: "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign"
(832)
Claude Levi-Strauss: "The Structural Study of Myth" (836)
February 22:
Jonathan Culler: "Literary Competence" (854)
Gerard Genette: "Frontiers of Narrative" (844)
Umberto Eco: "The Myth of Superman"
(866)
February 27: Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida: "Structure, Sign and Play" (878)
March 1: Deconstruction
Roland Barthes: "From Work to Text" (901)
Paul de Man: "Semiology and Rhetoric" (906)
March 6: Reader-Response Theory
March 8:
Wolfgang Iser: "The
Peter Rabinowitz: "Before
March 13: Psychoanalytic Theory
Sigmund Freud: "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" (483)
Carl Gustav Jung: "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to
Poetry" (506)
March 15: Psychoanalytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud: "The Theme of the Three Caskets" (488)
Northrop Frye: "The Archetypes of Literature" (643)
March 20: Lacan
Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror Stage” (Blackboard = BB)
Jacques Lacan: “The Significance of the Phallus” (BB)
March 22: Applied Lacan
Laura Mulvey: "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1445)
Slavoj Zizek: “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” (BB)
March 27: Marx
Karl Marx: "Consciousness
derived from Material Conditions" (388)
Karl Marx: "On Greek Art
in Its Time" (392)
March 29: Marxist Criticism
Walter Benjamin: "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1106)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno:
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception” (Bb)
April 3: Neo-Marxism
Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus
Raymond Williams: From Marxism and Literature
April 5: Neo-Marxist Criticism
Terry Eagleton: "Categories for Materialist Criticism" (1142)
Fredric Jameson: From The Political Unconscious (1172)
Jurgen Habermas: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1189)
April 10: New Historicism
Stephen Greenblatt:
Introduction to The Power of Forms
(1293) and "King Lear and
Harsnett's Devil-Fiction" (1295)
Clifford Geertz: "Deep
Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (1254)
April 12-22
Spring Break
April 24: New Historicism and Cultural Studies
Michel Foucault: "Las
Meninas" (1222)
Pierre Bourdieu: "The
Market of Symbolic Goods" (1232)
April 29: Feminism
Virginia Woolf:
"Shakespeare's Sister" (551) and
"Austen--Bronte--Eliot" (554)
Simone de Beauvoir: Myths: Of Women in Five Authors (638)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: "Infection in the Sentence"
(1361)
May 1: Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Michel Foucault: From Introduction
to the History of Sexuality (1472)
Eve Sedgwick: From Epistemology of
the Closet (1482)
May 6: Gender Studies
Helene Cixous: "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1454)
Luce Irigaray: "That Sex Which Is Not One" (1467)
Judith Butler: "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1514)
May 8: Canon and Culture Wars
Nina Baym: "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" (1540)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith: "Contingencies of Value" (1552)
John Guillory: "Cultural Capital" (1589)
May 13: Postcolonialism and Race Theory
Edward Said: Introduction to Orientalism
Gayatri Spivak: Three Women’s Texts (Bb)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference it Makes" (1576)
May 15: Cognitive Theory and the
Arts:
Elaine Scarry: On Vivacity (Bb); Lisa
Zunshine: “Theory of Mind and Representations of Fictional Consciousness (Bb).
May 17: The Future of Theory
May 20: Final Examination.
It would be nice if I could still cover criticism from Plato to the
present but contemporary theory needs to be covered in greater detail. The current syllabus restricts itself to the
modes of critical theory most in use today: formalism, semiotics,
deconstruction, reader response, psychoanalysis, Marxism, cultural studies, feminism,
gender studies / queer theory, and issues of the canon. We shall consider both theory and practical
applications. The course aims to help
the student both read and write in contemporary discourse about
literature.
The entire reading list for the course, aside from the recommended
readings and the specialized reading that will be required by your term essay,
comes to 6-700 pages. Unfortunately,
this does not mean that you can do your course reading on the subway. Some of
the assigned essays are difficult, and you may have to read them two or three
times before you understand them.
Furthermore, the readings show an extraordinary range of method, both
within and between categories. The best
way of keeping things straight will be to take notes on the reading, and to
participate in the class discussions.
Let me recommend the following procedures as an aid to better
understanding and longer retention:
1. Take advantage of the textbook's apparatus, including the introductory
essays (which "place" the writers within their groups), the
bibliographies for further reading, and the index, which allows you to quickly
cross-reference terms used differently by the various theorists.
2. Instead of listing the clever things a critic says, try to understand
what issue s/he is addressing. In other words, if this is the answer, then what
was the question?
3. Isolate the principal terms the
critic uses, and locate their definitions--if they are
explicitly defined--or try to reconstruct their definitions if only defined through
context.
4. Ask yourself what general
unstated assumptions about the nature of literature and about
the critic's task underlies the essay.
5. Try to get a fix on the
critic's method or mode of reasoning. Is s/he a lumper or a splitter.
Does s/he think that all studies are to be approached in more or less the same
way, or does subject-matter dictate methodology? What is "really real"? Is
everything "discourse" or is there something deeper than the way we
talk about things.
6. Mark down questions that occur to you.
Note problematic passages you don't understand; speculate on the
application of theories to imaginative works; note seeming inconsistencies or
apparent self-contradictions within the essays; note discrepancies between the
critic's views on literature and your own intuitive ideas. Mark passages in the
text that you think need further explication in class.
Class Discussion
My classes tend to be relatively informal. My "lectures" on formalism through
the culture wars are in your book as the introductory essays to each section.
If I've changed my mind or understand something better than when I wrote, I'll
let you know, but otherwise I think your time is too valuable for me to just
repeat myself. I like to use class time
to help students read the text, to clear up questions, problems,
contradictions, sometimes to explain the context of a given essay or how
critics later changed their minds....
Student questions are very important.
I hear both dumb questions and smart questions. Smart questions are designed to show the
instructor how smart you are; dumb questions are generated by real curiosity or
confusion. Never be afraid to ask dumb
questions in my class. And let me know
if the informality gets beyond what you can tolerate.
Term Paper
One term essay of 15-24 pages, applying THREE modes of literary theory to a single
short work of literature (a poem or a short story, say). Let me repeat: that's ONE work, THREE
modes. The focal text is to be cleared
with me in advance. I reserve the right
to veto texts I don't want to read or that bore me, as well as ones I just
don't think will stand up to the kind of scrutiny you will be giving. Pick your text because you genuinely enjoy it
(you better: you'll be encountering it over and over) and not because you think
it will deconstruct well or fit in with some other theory you're interested
in.
Turn in the paper in three stages.
Give me a draft of one reading on March 20, a draft of another reading
on April 12, and the final paper on the last day of class. Please get these in on time. If you miss the first deadline, don't just
turn it in the next week;
turn in both parts I and II on April 12.
There will be a final examination covering the required readings. I will
pass out a previous final in plenty of time for you to panic over it.