English 636
Professor David Richter
Literary Criticism
Spring 2011
Syllabus
Required Text: David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition (Third Edition: Bedford
Books of St. Martin's Press, 2006; note new edition; the dust jacket is
RED). The book has been ordered from the
QC Bookstore.
Course
Aims/Learning Goals: 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 contemporary
discourse about literature.
Tentative Schedule
In general: Please read the
introductions to Formalisms, Semiotics, etc., for the appropriate weeks of
class. This should go without saying
but….
February 2: 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.
February 9: Twentieth Century Formalism: 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)
February 16: Twentieth Century
Formalism II: Russian and Chicago Formalism
Victor Shklovsky: “Art as Technique” (774)
Yuri Tynyanov:
"On Literary Evolution" (BlackBoard)
Mikhail Bakhtin: “Heteroglossia and the Novel” (588)
R.S. Crane: from The
Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (BlackBoard)
Ralph Rader: "The Dramatic
Monologue and Related Lyric Forms" (BlackBoard)
February 23: No class; QC is on a
Monday schedule
March 2: Structuralism and Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure: “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign” (841)
Roman Jakobson: “Linguistics and Poetics” (852)
Claude Levi-Strauss: “The Structural Study of Myth” (860)
Umberto Eco: “The Myth of Superman” (950)
March 9: Structuralism and Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida: “Structure, Sign and Play” (915)
Roland Barthes: “From Work to Text” (878)
Paul de Man: “Semiology and Rhetoric” (882)
Lawrence Lipking: “The Practice of Theory” (894)
March 16: Reader-Response Theory
Stanley Fish: “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” (1022)
James Phelan: “Data, Danda, and Disagreement” (1031)
Wolfgang Iser: “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” (1002)
Peter Rabinowitz: “Before Reading” (1043)
March 23: 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)
Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage” (1122)
Jacques Lacan: “The Meaning of the Phallus” (1149)
March 30: Psychoanalytic Criticism
Norman Holland: “The Question: Who Reads What How” (1014)
Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1172)
Slavoj Zizek: “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” (1181)
April 6: Marxist Theory
Karl Marx: “Consciousness derived from Material Conditions” (406)
Karl Marx: “On Greek Art in Its Time” (410)
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)
April 13: Neo-Marxism
Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1263)
Fredric Jameson: From The Political Unconscious (1290)
Raymond Williams: From Marxism and Literature (1272)
Terry Eagleton: “Categories for Materialist Criticism” (1307)
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism and Consumer Society (1956)
April 17-26 Spring Vacation
April 27: New Historicism and
Cultural Studies
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)
Michel Foucault: “Las Meninas” (1357 read up on Foucault @ p. 833-4, 1326-29)
Pierre Bourdieu: “The Market of Symbolic Goods” (1232)
May 4: 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)
May 11: 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)
Judith Butler: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1707)
Gayle Rubin: From The Traffic in Women (1664)
May 18: Postcolonialism
and Critical Race Theory
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)
Rey Chow: “The Irruption of Referentiality” (1910)
Toni Morrison: From Playing in the Dark (1791)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference it Makes” (1891)
May 25: 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.
Readings: 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
so I can give you feedback that will let you rethink and revise before turning
in the final paper. Give me a draft of
one reading in March, a draft of another reading in early April, 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 in April.
Suggestions to stay interested and
keep me reading: do very different sorts of reading such as (1) A formal,
structural or semiotic reading (2) a psychoanalytic reading (3) a Marxist or
feminist reading. Theoretically you
could do three different formalist approaches, though,
if you're sure you can keep them straight.
A word to the wise about "reader response": this is a term that has a different meaning
in the Education Department. Remember
we're doing English here.
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.