English 382 1M3WA
Professor David Richter
Aspects of Criticism
Fall
2010
Syllabus
Required Text: David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition (Third Edition:
Tentative Schedule
In general: Please read the introductions to Formalisms, etc., for the
appropriate weeks of class.
August 30, 2010:
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, pp. 3-22.
September 1: Twentieth Century
Formalism I: New Criticism
Cleanth Brooks: “My Credo: Formalist Criticism” (798)
----- “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (799)
T.S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (537)
Wimsatt and Beardsley: “The Intentional Fallacy” (811)
September 6: Labor Day: No Class
September 8: Twentieth Century Formalism II: Neo-Aristotelianism
R.S. Crane: From “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks”(807)
R.S. Crane: “Crane on Macbeth” (BlackBoard)
Ralph Rader: “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms”
(BlackBoard)
September 13: Twentieth Century Formalism III: Russian Formalism
Victor Shklovsky: “Art as Technique” (774)
Vladimir Propp: “Fairy Tale Transformations” (785)
Mikhail Bakhtin: “Heteroglossia and the Novel” (588)
September 15: Structuralism and
Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure: “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign” (841)
Roman Jakobson: “Linguistics and Poetics” (852)
Roland Barthes: “The Structuralist Activity” (871)
September 20: Applied Structuralism and Semiotics
Claude Levi-Strauss: “The Structural Study of Myth” (860)
Roland Barthes: “Striptease” (869)
Umberto Eco: “The Myth of Superman”
(950)
September 22: Deconstruction in
Theory
Jacques Derrida: “Structure, Sign and Play” (915)
September 27: Deconstruction in Practice
Roland Barthes: “From Work to Text” (878)
Paul de Man: “Semiology and Rhetoric” (882)
September 29: Reader-Response
Theory
James Phelan: “Data, Danda, and Disagreement” (1031)
October 4: Reader-Response Theory II
Wolfgang Iser: “The
Peter Rabinowitz: “Before
October 6: Psychoanalytic Theory
Sigmund Freud: “The Dream Work” (500)
Sigmund Freud: “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (509)
Carl Gustav Jung: “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”
(544)
October 11: Columbus Day, no class
October 13: Psychoanalytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud: “The ‘Uncanny’”(514)
Norman Holland: “The Question: Who Reads What How” (1014)
October 18: Lacan
Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage” (1122)
Jacques Lacan: “The Meaning of the Phallus” (1149)
October 20: Applied Lacan
Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1172)
Slavoj Zizek: “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” (1181)
October 25: Karl Marx
Karl Marx: “The Alienation of
Labor” (400)
Karl Marx: “Consciousness
derived from Material Conditions” (406)
Karl Marx: “On Greek Art in
Its Time” (410)
October 27: Marxist Criticism of the
Walter Benjamin: “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1232)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno:
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1254)
November 1: Neo-Marxist Theory –
Gramsci, Althusser, Jameson
Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1263)
Fredric Jameson: From The Political Unconscious (1290)
Raymond Williams: From Marxism and Literature (1272)
November 3: Neo-Marxist Criticism
Terry Eagleton: “Categories for Materialist Criticism” (1307)
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism and Consumer Society (1956)
Jurgen Habermas: Modernity vs. Postmodernity (1947)
November 8: The New Historicism
Stephen Greenblatt:
Introduction to The Power of Forms
(1443) and “King Lear and Harsnett's
Devil-Fiction” (1445)
Hayden White: “The Historical
Text as Literary Artifact” (1383)
November 10: Cultural Studies
Michel Foucault: “Las Meninas”
(1357 – plus read up on Foucault @ p. 833-4, 1326-29)
Pierre Bourdieu: “The Market
of Symbolic Goods” (1232)
Laura Kipnis: “(Male) Desire
and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler
(1485)
November 15: Feminism
Virginia Woolf: Selections from A Room of One’s Own (599-611)
Simone de Beauvoir: Myths: Of Women in Five Authors (673)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: “Infection in the Sentence” (1531)
Toril Moi: From Sexual/Textual Politics (1545)
November 17: Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Michel Foucault: From Introduction
to the History of Sexuality (1627)
Eve Sedgwick: From Between Men
and Epistemology of the Closet (1683)
November 22: Gender Studies
Judith Butler: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1707)
Martha Nussbaum: “The Professor of Parody”
Gayle Rubin: From The Traffic in
Women (1664)
November 24: Gender and
Jonathan Culler: “
Elaine Showalter: From Critical Cross-Dressing (1592)
Terry Eagleton: “A Response to Elaine Showalter” (1597) and Showalter’s
Reply (1599)
November 29: Postcolonialism
Benedict Anderson: The Origins of National Consciousness (1815)
Edward Said: Introduction to Orientalism
(1801)
Gayatri Spivak: “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”(1836)
December 1: Postcolonialism
Chinua Achebe: “An Image of
Homi Bhabha: “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1875)
Fredric Jameson: From “
Aijaz Ahmad: From “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness” (1831) and Jameson’s
Response (1834)
Rey Chow: “The Irruption of Referentiality” (1910)
December 6: Critical Race Theory
Toni Morrison: From Playing in the
Dark (1791)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference it Makes”
(1891)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: From “Preface to Blackness” (1904)
December 8: Cognitive Theory and the Arts:
Elaine Scarry: On Vivacity (1057)
Mark Turner: “Metaphor and the
Conceptual Context of Invention” (1077)
Lisa Zunshine: “Theory of Mind and
Representations of Fictional Consciousness (1089).
December 13: The Literary Canon: Aesthetics and Politics
David Hume: “Of the Standard of Taste” (234)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith: “Contingencies of Value” (245)
Nina Baym: “Melodramas of Beset Manhood” (1520)
John Guillory: “Cultural Capital” (1472)
Course Aims: An understanding, in theory and practice, of contemporary
literary theory, emphasizing to the modes of critical theory underlying the
practical criticism most in use today: formalism, semiotics, deconstruction,
reader response, psychoanalysis, Marxism,
cultural studies, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory,
critical race theory, cognitive literary 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.
Reading List: 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 600 to 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: Expectations: I expect you to have read the course
materials on the day of the discussion.
My classes tend to be relatively informal. I could give lectures, but what I have to say
is already in your textbook. If I've changed my mind or understand something
better than when I wrote, I'll let you know, but 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. Do not be afraid to ask
a question because you think it’s not sophisticated enough to impress me. I am quite sufficiently impressed by
questions that are generated by genuine curiosity or even by genuine
confusion. Never be afraid to ask
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 the same 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 think you are
interested in.
Turn in the paper in three stages.
Give me a draft of one reading the first week of October, a draft of
another reading the first week of November, 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 the first week of November.
Final Examination: 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.
Grades: 50% of your grade will be based on the term essay; 25% on the
final examination; 25% on your class discussion.
David Richter contact information:
Office: Klapper 639
Days in: Mondays and Wednesdays
Office Hours: 4-6 M
Telephone: 718-997-4684 (voicemail is available but I
don’t seem to be able to access it from elsewhere)
Email: david.richter@qc.cuny.edu