Literary Theory
Jean-Michel Rabaté profile
TR 12-1:30
The aim of this new course is to provide a general introduction to the
main discourses of current literary theory, surveying as many critical
approaches as possible. After an evaluative history of aesthetics from
the Romantics to Adorno, we shall focus on Barthes's readings of high and
low culture (with his "mythologies"), his use of semiotics and structural
analysis to reformulate the question of interpretation, and finally his
redefinition of the concepts of text, language and writing. We shall
then explore a few contemporary hermeneutical strategies such as
deconstruction and psychoanalysis (in a famous confrontation of readings
of Poe's "Purloined Letter"), post-colonial and cultural studies, through
a selection of exemplary essays. Four books are assigned, and will be
complemented by a few hand-outs: (1) Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the
Aesthetic, Blackwell, 1990; (2) A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag,
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982; (3) The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida,
and Psychoanalytic Reading, edited by J. P. Muller an W. J. Richardson,
Johns Hopkins U. P., 1988: (4) Literary Theory Today, edited by Peter
Collier an Helga Geyer-Ryan, Cornell U. P., 1990. Requirements: Four
short papers of six to eight pages, one research paper of fifteen pages
and one oral report will be required. No final exam. (NOTE: English 204
has been deliberately assigned a number in our "core" series, though it
is not required of majors. We do urge all majors to take either English
204 or English 100 as an introduction to the kinds of theoretical
questions raised in many other courses.)
updated 2006-10-17
