Updated February 6, 2007

ENGL 387/487 (WLIT 387/487), Spring 2007
Gary Lee Stonum, Guilford 315, 368-3342
Office hours: Tuesdays, 11:30 am to 12:45 pm and by appointment
Email: gary.stonum@case,.edu

Literary and Critical Theory
Policies and procedures

 

Course aims and organization: The course will survey the lively world of modern critical theory, particularly work done in the last 30 years. We will examine most of the influential types of criticism that have flourished during this time, treating them roughly in the order in which they arose or first migrated into English studies. The primary concern will be to understand and evaluate the claims they make about the nature and function of texts.

By the end of the course, you should have a fair overview of modern theory, a quickened ability to read and assess criticism, a firm grasp of a few critical positions and schools, and a cannier sense of your own practices and predilections. Accomplishing all this will leave you with something less than total mastery. Not to worry. The course is designed as an introduction to ideas, activities, and methods some may wish to explore more fully later on and all are likely to recognize as saturating contemporary artistic and intellectual life.

Readings:  Please read the assignments carefully before we begin to discuss them in class.   Graduate students should read all the background readings as well; undergraduates may feel free to pick and choose.

Some readings will be denser or more difficult than others, especially ones from intellectual traditions that you may not have encountered previously.   Feel free to avail yourself of the numerous and sometimes useful bluffer's guides that now exist for literary theory.    For example, the series of graphic books entitled [Theorist's Name Here] for Beginners provide clear, helpful, and surprisingly reliable guides, better than many of the introductory textbooks on the market. Moreover, by now the Internet is replete with guides, banter, debate, and denunciation, much of it interesting and some of it even reliable.

Writing assignments

 (387) You are asked to write three papers. The first two will be reports, summarizing articles required or recommended for the class as a whole.  In four to five pages (750 to 1000 words) you should describe the article's purposes, premises, and key points and perhaps also give some sense of the alternatives it contests or engages.  (Note that you are not obliged to provide a critique, although such analysis is not strictly forbidden either.)  Via the course roundtable (or email, xerox, passenger pigeon etc.) the reports will then get published to and for the class. 

The final paper is your opportunity for application, synthesis, or rejoinder.  For 387 the recommended assignment is to select a volume from the Bedford Casebooks in Contemporary Criticism, and to write an eight to ten page paper identifying and exploring what you regard as the most important or interesting theoretical issues in the primary text. 

Bedford Casebooks (published by St. Martin's, with Ross Murfin as general editor) all include one more or less classic literary text (e.g. Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, Heart of Darkness, Portrait of the Artist, etc), overviews of the history of scholarship on the text, and four or five essays by divers hands meant to exemplify some brand-name theoretical perspective on the text. Consult the St. Martin's web site for a complete list of titles (and do not confuse this series with their Cultural Contexts series).   We will be using The Scarlet Letter in the class, and there may be some advantages if many or all of you write your final paper on that novel.

Ambitious undergraduates may substitute the final assignment for 487, but be sure to get the instructor's approval in advance.

(487)   Graduate students will write four papers:  three reports and as the final paper an eight to twelve page scholarly book review of one of the following works or an approved theoretical monograph of your choice: 

  • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
  • J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading
  • Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (collection of essays)
  • Terry Eagleton, After Theory
  • Michael Berubé, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies (anthology)
  • Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
  • Peter Rabinowitz, Before Reading
  • Michael Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol 1
  • John Guillory, Cultural Capital
  • Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
  • Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics

Reviews should evaluate the work in its own terms and may well also deal with its impact on subsequent theory and criticism.

Word to the wise:  In most cases a competent review or report will require some research into background and contexts.   Feel free to consult the instructor and to share resources with one another, but do not expect to begin work the night before the paper is due.

Blackboard.com roundtable: Besides papers and class discussion, the public work of the course will include participation in a computer roundtable. You are asked to contribute at least five messages to this roundtable over the course of the semester,  including the reports that get posted.  Three of those messages should appear before fall break.

Roundtable messages are normally much more like email messages or blog entries than formal papers. Most are likely to be comments and questions about the readings at hand, further thoughts about topics addressed earlier in the course, remarks about subjects neglected or not yet taken up, and responses to what others have had to say in class or on the roundtable. [Previous roundtables for this course have even been the occasion for <shudder> irony and satire.] The content, format, tone and stance of these messages are up to you. You will be evaluated on whether you contribute but not on what.

In addition to writing messages to the roundtable, you are responsible for keeping up with reading the messages of others. Try to read the new messages at least once a week, if not shortly before each class meeting.

Grades: Final grades will be assigned holistically rather than mathematically, but for both 387 and 487 roughly half the grade will be based on the summaries, perhaps a third on the final paper, and the remainder on participation in class and on the roundtable. I leave open the option of a final examination. And no, sorry, my lawn does not need mowing.

Required texts

  • Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory:  A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP.
  • David Richter, The Critical Tradition,  3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin's [includes all articles identified by author and title on the assignment calendar unless otherwise specified ]
  • Ross Murfin, ed., The Scarlet Letter, Bedford/St. Martin's 

 

Texts on library reserve or supplied by the instructor

  • Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," from Margins of Philosophy
  • Paul de Man, "Resistance to Theory" from Resistance to Theory
  • Yonjae-Jung, "The 'Imaginary' Wilson" and "The 'Symbolic' Father" [Case doctoral dissertation, 2000, pp 42-103

Random background sources and bluffer's guides

  • Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge UP, 1980 (translation of L'meme et l'autre).   A brief, clear guide to the post World War Two French intellectual scene deriving from Hegel and Heidegger, that jumpstarts the Age of Theory.
  • Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, Manchester UP, 2nd edition, 2002 [1995].   Many students have found this useful, but I urge caution;  Barry simplifies some things and gets others wrong.
  • Vincent Leitch, American literary criticism from the thirties to the eighties, Columbia UP, 1988.   A standard history.
  • [various}, X for Beginners.  Writers and Readers publications.   Comic books on Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, etc.
  • Vincent Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Norton 2001. Bits and pieces of theorists from soup to nuts, with generally excellent introductions.
  • Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 2nd ed., U of Minnesota P, 1996.  Once the best intro to theory and still the liveliest.

 

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