Annotation
Week 1 Introduction: What is “literature”? What is “theory”? 21 Feb Syllabus; Course procedures; Assessment
Week 2 Antiquity 28 Feb Plato, Republic – “Book X,” Ion, From Phaedrus
Aristotle, From Poetics
Week 3 Renaissance 7 Mar Philip Sidney, From Apologie of Poetrie
Development of rhetoric: tropes & schemes
Week 4 Classicism 14 Mar John Dryden, From An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Metrics: rhymes, types of metrical analysis
N. B. no class 21 Mar
Week 5 Romanticism 28 Mar William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Samuel T. Coleridge, From Biographia Literaria
Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
Week 6* Formalism & New Criticism 4 Apr Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
I. A. Richards, From Principles of Literary Criticism
Week 8 Structuralism 11 Apr Ferdinand de Saussure, “Nature of the Linguistic Sign”
Roman Jakobson, From Linguistics and Poetics
Week 9 Poststructuralism 18 Apr Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” “The Death of the Author”
Jacques Derrida, “Differance”
Week 10 Psychoanalysis 25 Apr Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work,” “The Uncanny”
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”
Week 11 Modernism & Postmodernism 2 May T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”
Fredric Jameson, From Postmodernism and Consumer Society
Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction”
Week 12 Feminism & Gender 9 May Patricia Waugh, “Postmodernism and Feminism”
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, From Infection in the Sentence & Dialogue with Toril Moi
Week 13* Postcolonialism & Cultural Studies 16 May Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature?”
*MID-TERM & FINAL PAPERS DUE