Reading takes you places.
Reading is a means of transformation.
Reading is a means of preservation.
Reading brings places to you.
Reading places you.
Critical theorists debate not only these propositions but also shape stories about the forces, the objects and the structures of circulation that attend the creation of a textual encounter and they imagine the possible outcomes of such an encounter. In tone, not always tentative, often declarative. Always interested. Perhaps, open to feedback.
Read "critical theory" for "reading" above.
Adams, Hazard and Leroy Searle. Critical Theory since 1965. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.
Lodge, David. ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 1988
Bullock Allan, Oliver Stallybrass and Stephen Trombley, eds. The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought
Laplanche, J and J.-B. Pontalis. The language of psycho-analysis
Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
Makaryk, Irena, ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society
Readings |
|
| In Media Res: Constant Dialogue | |
| Week 1 | M.H.
Abrams, "The Deconstructive Angel" in Lodge. pp. 264-276. |
| Difference and Semiosis | |
| Week 2 | Ferdinand de Saussure, "Nature of the linguistic sign" in Lodge, pp. 10-14. Charles Sanders Peirce, "from Letters to Lady Welby" in Adams & Searle. pp. 639-644. |
| Relays & Delays | |
| Week 3 | Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play" in Lodge. pp. 107-123. Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" in Adams & Searle. pp. 738-756. |
| Pleasure, Privilege, Power | |
| Week 4 | Alice Jardine, "Gynesis" in Adams & Searle. pp.
560-570. |
| Bridge & Gap | |
| Week 5 | Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response" in
Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English
Institute, ed. by J. Hillis Miller. New York: 1971. pp.
2-45. |
| Week 6 | Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy" in Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West. New York and Cambridge, Mass.: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. pp. 233-246 |
| Week 7 | Gayatri C. Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism"
in 'Race', Writing and Difference, ed. by Henry Louis Gates
Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. pp. 262-88. |
| Week 8 | James Clifford, "On Collecting Art and Culture" in The
Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and
Art, Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1998. pp.
215-251. |
| Week 9 | Harold Bloom, selection from Poetry and Repression: Revisionism
from Blake to Stevens, 1976. pp. 1-26 |
| Week 10 | Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" rpt in Adams &
Searle, 680-684. |
| Week 11 | Samuel Delany, "Shadow and Ash" in Longer Views: Extended
Essays. Hanover, N.H. Wesleyan University Press, 1996. pp.
144-173. |
| Week 12 | Leslie Marmon Silko, "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination"
in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology,
ed. by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 1996. pp. 264-275. |
| Week 13 | Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. "Futuristic Flu or The Revenge of the Future" in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative ed. by George Slusser and Tom Shippey, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. pp. 26-45. |
Assignments |
|
| 20% | Group Project: Cross-referenced Critcial Term Cluster |
| 30% | Short Commentary on C. Belsey, "Literature, history, politics" |
| 40% | Paper |
| 10% | Test: Names and Themes |