English 602:
Literary Theory and Critical Practice
Books:
Augustine: Confessions
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling
Shakespeare: Hamlet
Fay Weldon: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Plato: Phaedrus
Rene Girard: Violence and the Sacred
Course Reader from Cal Copies (located on College Avenue next to Starbucks)
Requirements:
Formal Presentation: 20%
Seminar papers: 40%
Final Exam: 20%
Participation in all seminars: 20%
Formal Presentations:
All students are responsible for one formal PowerPoint project on one of the readings scheduled for that day’s discussion. Please indicate which text you wish to treat on the sign-up sheet. Presentations should be thorough and yet thoughtful. Please consider discussion points your classmates may find of interest, and be prepared to allow for discussion as it might arise. Responses from the rest of the class will be invited after and/or during your reading.
Papers:
Two papers (8 pages minimum each), treating two of the units covered in class (“Faith,” “Self,” “Knowledge,” or “Culture”), will be due at dates specified below. You may choose any two units you please--the remaining units will be covered in the Final Exam (see below). The papers will be due at the end of the unit at hand (see schedule). Topics are open as long as they cover the works specified in that particular unit. Background sources required for each.
Final Exam:
A final take-home exam will be required at the end of the semester and will cover the remaining two units not chosen for explication in a paper. Finals must be submitted on Blackboard no later than the scheduled Final Exam date designated by the university.
Participation:
This class is designed as a seminar. Participation and attendance are mandatory. Students who expect a grade of “B+” or better should plan on missing NO class after week 2. Students in the “B” range should miss no more than two classes. Students who miss more than three classes can expect to earn a grade no higher than “C.” In addition, it should be clear that you have come to class having read all the materials assigned to be covered that day. You should identify the relevant issues and arguments IN ADVANCE and be prepared to discuss them in class.
Do not plan to be silent in this class: this portion of your grade is worth 20% of your total, and I take it very seriously.
Schedule:
Week 1. Introduction: History of Literary Theory
Faith
Week 2. Augustine: Confessions
Homi Bhabha: “Signs Taken for Wonders”
Week 3. Augustine, from On Christian Doctrine
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling
Bible: Abraham and Isaac story
Week 4. Girard: “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double,” in Violence and the Sacred
Girard: “Sacrifice” from Violence and the Sacred
Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals, Essays 1 and 2
Paper #1 due
Self
Week 5. Fay Weldon: Confessions of a She Devil
Week 6. Foucault: “Subject and Power”
Hobbes: from Leviathan
Hegel: Master/Slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit
Week 7.
Goffman: “Performances”
Lacan: “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”
Week 8: Judith Butler: “Bodily Inscriptions”
Martha Nussbaum: “The Professor of Parody”
Cixous: “Laugh of the Medusa”
Paper #2 due Monday, October 26
Knowledge
Week 9. Shakespeare: Hamlet
Week 10. Freud: from The Interpretation of Dreams
Lacan: “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”
Lacan: “The Mirror Stage”
Week 11. Descartes: Meditation Two from Discourse on Method and the Meditations
Lakoff: “Metaphors We Live By”
Bakhtin: “The Problem of Speech Genres”
Week 12. Plato: Phaedrus
Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”
Paper #3 due Monday, November 23
Culture
Week 13. David Foster Wallace: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”
Greenblatt: “Culture”
Baudrillard: “The Precession of Simulacra”
Week 14. Adorno and Horkheimer: “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
Barthes: Mythologies
Paper #4 due Tuesday, December 8