INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

MATERIALS

Vincent Leitch, gen. ed., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Richard Harland, Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes.

COURSE SCHEDULE

I. Speech, Writing, Truth, Power

Plato, Ion and Phaedrus
Lévi-Strauss, “A Writing Lesson”
Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen”
Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”

II. Tradition(s), Influences, Intertexts

Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Introduction and Interchapter)
Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition”
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Chapter 2)
Ngugi et al., “On the Abolition of the English Department”

III. Language, Literariness, Discourse, Heteroglossia

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Four Chapters)
Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics” and “Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (Part I, Sections 2, 5, 12)
Heidegger, “Language”
B. Anderson, "The Origins of National Consciousness"
Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel (Sections 1 and 2)
Anzaldua, “La conciencia de la mestiza”

IV. Subjectivity, Otherness, Identity, Difference

Hegel, Phenomenolgy of Spirit (“Master-Slave Dialectic”)
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”
Butler, Gender Trouble (Selections from Preface and Chapter 3)
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

V. Ideology and Hegemonic Systems

Marx and Engels, Selections from The German Ideology, Communist Manifesto, and
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Hebdige, Subculture (Chapter 1)
Foucault, Discipline and Punish (“The Carceral”)
Said, Orientalism (Introduction)
Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Berlant & Warner, "Sex in Public"

VI. Modernity and Postmodernity

Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project”
Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern”
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”
Hardt & Negri, "Symptoms of Passage," Empire