English 190

Book List

Beckett, Samuel: Endgame; Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights; Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet; Sophocles: Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

Other Readings and Media

A course reader containing works and excerpts by:

literary figures such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, and Franz Kafka;

and theorists and critics such as Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, William Empson, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Marjorie Levinson, Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Michael Awkward, Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Appiah, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Howard Caygill, Stephen Greenblatt, T.S. Eliot, and Dirk Van Hulle.

Description

This course explores some major figures in literary history and serves as an introduction to the challenges of literary theory and criticism. We will attend to the theoretical and practical difficulties of approaches to literary works: what does it mean to ‘apply’ a theory in an act of reading? We will be concerned with how theorists and critics respond (or fail to respond) to the concrete demands of individual texts when confronting them with various political, philosophical, and other hypotheses (or indeed presuppositions). Each class will be organized around the reading of a major work of poetry, prose, or drama alongside one or more of the influential interpretations it has occasioned. The course aims to introduce an array of theories of literary and critical methodologies. It also will provide us the opportunity to read some major writers in a broad, comparative context.

Please read the paragraph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.