01:00P-02:15P TR (30) 3 cr.
PREREQUISITE: L202 with grade of C- or better. NOTE: The English Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite. Students who have not completed L202 with a grade of C- or better will have their registration administratively cancelled .
The 2001 publication of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism suggests how thoroughly the once-threatening "Theory" has been embraced within the academic study of literature in the U.S. Using that anthology as our central textbook, we will explore the modern history of literary criticism and theory, often turning to works of literature, art, and culture as test cases of and challenges to the claims made by critics and theorists. The course will be organized according to such categories as: Formalism (Cleanth Brooks); Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson); Deconstruction (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson); Marxism and Cultural Studies (Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, Dick Hebdige); Feminism and Gender Studies (Laura Mulvey, Julia Kristeva, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler); and Postcolonial Studies (Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak). We will also, however, consider the ways these categories break down, overlap, and inform one another. Additional works might include poems, stories, films, and rock songs by John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Gang of Four, as well as contemporary magazine and television advertisements and other works to be determined according to the interests of class members. Class work will likely include in-class presentations on the readings (to be written up as short papers), a midterm and final, and a final paper that may be either a theoretically informed reading of a particular literary, artistic, or cultural text, or an analysis of a critic or theorist's work.