Professor James Leonard. Elective. Meets at The Citadel, Thursday, 7-9:45 p.m.
The Spring 2019 edition of ENGL 555 will consider primary questions about our relation to literature, including the following:
- What is literature?
- How does literature affect us?
- How can we ascertain the meaning/significance of a work of literature?
- What sorts of commentary are appropriate for the reader/critic?
Following a whirlwind tour, during the first class meeting, of the pre-twentieth-century history of literary theory (with attention to such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, and James), we will devote the rest of the semester to dominant critical theories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries— beginning with the dramatic critical turn of formalism/new criticism (T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks) and proceeding to the eventual reactions to it: genre criticism (Northrop Frye) and genetic criticism (E. D. Hirsch). At that point (the 1950s and 1960s), we will encounter the equally momentous turn away from the strictly internal meaningfulness of the “work,” as literary object or as authorial expression, to reader response’s examination of the work/text as meaningful in relation to the reader (Norman Holland) and structuralism’s/semiotics’ focus on relation to the cultural context (Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault)—leading also to the more psychoanalytically inclined textual examinations of deconstruction (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida). We will conclude the survey of recent critical theory with a look at the cultural criticisms that derive their methodologies from the structuralist and deconstructive turns, including Marxist (Terry Eagleton), feminist (Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous), African American (S. D. Kapoor), and postcolonial (Homi K. Bhabha). Interspersed with the critical theory essays will be essays that apply the various critical theories to a single test case (Huckleberry Finn).
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