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This course will focus on critical texts that consider the social implications of literature and language. As background, we will review foundational writings from several traditions, reading works by Aristotle (formalism and genre study), Wollstonecraft (western feminism), Marx (social class), Freud (psychology), ethics (Singer, Regan), and Hughes (race). For our remaining weeks we will focus on contemporary readings grouped under three main topics, each of which represents an expanding field: transimperialism and post-colonialism; sexuality studies; and ecological/post-anthropocene criticism. Students are also welcome to suggest and develop other subjects of special interest to them.
Students will be asked to prepare questions and "applications" for discussion, to lead class discussion on specific selections from time to time, to post brief responses to the course texts on ICON, and to write either one or two critical essays evaluating course material and related readings. Many of our selections will be from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which I will supplement with several handouts (on ecocriticism, sexuality studies, transimperialism, and other topics).
Syllabus for English 6000: Critical Theory and the Social World
August 23rd T Introduction; handout
Some Basic Approaches; formalism; aesthetics; feminism, structural economics; psychology; reception theory
25th Th Aristotle, Poetics
30th T Immanuel Kant, selections from the Critique of Judgment
September 1st Th
5th T selections from Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," Das Kapital, and other writings; Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (handout)
7th Th Christine de Pizan, “The Book of the City of Ladies,” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (handout)
First posting due Friday September 9th
13th T psychology/psychological approaches: Sigmund Freud, including “Mourning and Melancholia,” Civilization and Its Discontents
15th Th reader response/audience: Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Jane Tompkins
T 20th -----
Race/Transimperial and Postcolonial Theory
Th 22nd W. E. B. DuBois, “Souls of Black Folk”; Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
T 27th Khiara M. Bridges, ed., Critical Race Theory, chapters 1 (Origins), 4 (Latinx Criticism), 6 (Legal Construction of Race), 7 (Structural Racism)
Th 29th Critical Race Theory, chapters 8 (Implicit Bias), and 12 (Intersectionality); selections, Alice Walker, In Our Mothers’ Gardens; bell hooks
Second posting due Friday October 1st
October 4th T Leela Gandhi, “Postcolonial Theory”; Ania Loomba, “Situating Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies”
6th Th Edward Said, selections from Culture and Imperialism; Fritz Fanon, selections from Black Skin, White Masks
11th T Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders”
13th Th ------
Ecology, Environmental Ethics
13th Th William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” “Art and the Beauty of the Earth”
Third posting due Friday October 15th
18th T John Muir (Thoreau, Emerson if class haven’t read these); Carolyn Merchant, selections from Radical Ecology
20th Th The Oxford Handbook on Environmental Ethics, ed. Stephen Gardiner and Allen Thompson, chapter 1, Jason Kawall, “A History of Environmental Ethics”; chapter 15, “Phenomenology and Environmental Ethics”; chapter 16, Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Value, Nature, and Environment”; chapter 24, Chris J. Cuomo, “Sexual Politics in Environmental Ethics”; Val Plumwood (selection from Feminism and the Mastery of Nature)
25th T Arne Naess, “Deep Ecology”; Gardiner and Thompson, chapter 33, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, “Ethical Energy Choices,”; chapter 43, “Environmental Conflict”; chapter 46, “From Environmental Ethics to Environmental Action”
27th Th Elizabeth Miller, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, introduction, conclusion, and chapter 3, “Worldbuilding Meets Terraforming: Energy, Extraction, and Speculative Fiction” (can skim specific critiques)
Fourth posting due October 29th
November 1st applied ethics: animal rights, Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights
3rd Th applied ethics: trauma, holocaust, memory and forgetting: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score; Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory
8th T -----
Gender and Sexuality
10th Th selection from Michel Foucault, “History of Sexuality”; Eve Sedgwick, from “Epistomology of the Closet”; Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble; Susan Brownmiller; Gayle Rubin
Please submit title, bibliography and abstract for your final seminar paper.
15th T Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality”; Susan Stryker, “Transgender History,” introduction; Kate Bornstein, “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us”
17th Th from The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, ed. Siobhan Somerville: Chapter 1, Kadji Amin, “Genealogies of Queer Theory,” Chapter 2, Keguro Macharia, “Queer Writing, Queer Politics: Working across Difference,” Chapter 4, Cael M. Keegan, “Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things with Trans*”
Fifth posting due November 19th
Thanksgiving break
29th T -----
December 1st Th Up to you! Class will choose—see list at end
Sixth posting due December 3rd
6th T Class will choose—see list at end
8th Th first half of class provide oral summary of final papers
Final exam: rest of class oral summary of your essays, Monday December 12th or Tuesday December 13th
FINAL 15 PAGE ESSAY DUE FRIDAY DECEMBER 17th, 2022
For our final week, you have two choices. You may decide among yourselves on a project/set of readings, to be divided as you wish (as a class, smaller groups). Alternately you may select your favorite(s) from the following list, and I will provide two or three relevant readings for each:
Translation theory
Postmodernism (Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault)
Postmodern psychology (Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Nancy Chodorow)
Ethics and literature (Wayne Booth, Derek Attridge; possibly Levinas)
Feminism (écriture feminine, Gilbert and Gubar, Susan Bordo, violence, feminist narrative ethics)
Film theory (Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey)
Theories of utopia, futurism (Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas)
Structuralism and poststructuralism (the Russian formalists, Levi-Strauss, Althusser)
Narratology (Russian formalists, Bakhtin, Todorov, Peter Brooks, feminist narratology)
Historicism (Wilhelm Dilthey, Hayden White, Ernst Bloch, Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Paul)
Linguistic theory and its descendants (Saussure, Heidegger, New Criticism, Derrida)
Cultural studies and postmodern cultural studies (Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Macheray, Dick Hebdige, Henri Lefebvre)
Phenomenology (Brentano, Husserl, Bachelard, Heidegger, Poulet, Sartre)
20th-21st Century Marxism/Globalism: Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, A. Sen, Thomas Piketty, Thomas Pogge
Disability Studies: Lennard Davis