INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• 12/5: One student paper for this week is available

SYLLABUS SHORTCUTS

DESCRIPTION

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

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All changes to the syllabus, as well as to the short paper schedule, will be made from this home page, so please look here, and not to the printed syllabus, for up to date information.

READINGS

PARTICIPATION

WRITTEN WORK

Your aim in these short papers should be to situate the chosen text in relation to the general problematic or topic of the segment. Try to indicate the specific character of the text, describing its central thesis or preoccupation and its mode of presentation in such a way as to clarify its differences from other readings in the segment. And try, as well, to indicate what you regard as the main weakness of the text, the point at which one might begin to marshall a critique of it.

It is more important to submit these short papers on time, so that they can be incorporated into our seminar discussions, than to refine them to the point of perfection. Likewise, the research papers you write for this course should be regarded as first attempts at a topic, not as quasi-publishable articles. The research papers can be rather short (12 pages is fine) as well as tentative in their conclusions; you can always rework them later, after getting some feedback from me. But please submit them by the beginning of exam week, as indicated on the schedule. I will be leaving the area a few days later and will not be returning for seven or eight months, so I am disallowing incompletes for this course except in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

MOCK EXAM

Sept 6     --         Introduction


                                 I. The Cultural Worker: Intellectuals 
                                         and Social Purpose

Sept 13    --         Arnold, "Function of Criticism at the Present Time" 
                                                           (I.20)
		      de Man, "Resistance to Theory" (I.21)
		      Radhakrishnan, "Toward an Effective Intellectual" (I.22)

                      
                                 II.  Cultural Economies and the 
                                     Production of Cultural Value

Sept 20    --         Marx, from Capital (II.32)
                      Levi Strauss, "Science of the Concrete" (II.34)
                      Irigaray, "Women on the Market" (II, 22)	
		                               

Sept 27    --         Kant, from Critique of Judgment (II.31)
                      Bourdieu, "Structures, Habitus, Power" (II.36)
                      Bourdieu, "Towards a Vulgar Critique of Pure 
			Critiques" (11.37)


                                 III.  "Cultural" Domination: Ideology 
						and Hegemony

Oct 4      --	      Marx, "Estranged Labour," "Conciousness," and "Ruling 
				Class and Ruling Ideas" (II.17)
		      Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State 
                                Apparatuses" (II.21)

Oct 11     --         Gramsci, from Prison Notebooks (II.19)
                      Fanon, 'On National Culture" (II.18)


                                 IV.  The Object of Culture: Some 
					Formalist Statements on Method

Oct 18     --         Aristotle, "Poetics" (I.5)
                      Eichenbaum, "Theory of the Formal Method" (I.2)
                      Wimsatt and Beardsley, "Intentional Fallacy" (I.18)

Oct 25     --         Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics (I.1)
                      Barthes, "Structuralist Activity" (I.4)
                      Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play" (I.3)


                                 V.  Culture and Patriarchy: Some 
				     Feminist and Queer Interventions

Nov 1      --         Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema " (I.14)
                      Freud, "Fetishism" (II.1)
                      Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" and "The Meaning of the 
			Phallus" (II.2)

Nov 8      --         Irigaray, 'This Sex Which is not One" (II.4)
                      Rubin, "Traffic in Women" (II.3)
                      Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto" (II.8)

Nov 15     --         Abelove, "Speculations on the History of Sexual 
			Intercourse" (II.6)
                      Sedgwick, "Beast in the Closet" (II.7)
                      Dollimore, "Perverse Dynamic" (II.9)

           
                                 V.  Cultural Imperialism and the 
					Postcolonial Subject

Nov 22  --            NO CLASS -- T-GIVING BREAK (celebration of 
			genocide-masquerading-as-friendship)

Nov 29 --             Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered" (II.26)
                      Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (II.28)
                      Anzaldua, from Borderlands/La Frontera (II.13)
                      Chow, "Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures" 
			(II.15)

Dec 6      --         Fanon, from Black Skin, White Masks (II.10)
                      Bhabha, Interrogating Identity (II.29)
		           Brief Concluding Discussion



                        	    [Final Papers due by December 14th]