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L371 1957 ROSENBLUM
Introduction to Criticism

2:30p-3:45p TR (30) 3 cr.

PREREQUISITE: L202 NOTE: The English Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite. Students who have not completed L202 will not be allowed to register for this course.

"The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read."

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory

Hopefully this course will help students feel comfortable with the kind of perpetual "undoing" that Culler associates with doing theory. We will read recent theory which tries to complicate our notions about the nature of literature, the act of writing, and the act of reading (including works of Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida). We will also read some of the "classic" literary criticism which contemporary theory attempts to question (including works of Plato, Aristotle, Dr. Johnson, and Matthew Arnold). I have not yet decided on texts yet but we will use Culler's Literary Theory (Oxford, 1997) as a starting point. It will be supplemented by an anthology of classic criticism and of recent theory. We will also read Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties,a work which raises interesting questions about the relation between historical and fictional narrative. Students will be asked to write frequent short themes as well as three or four longer papers (4-5 pages).

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