15077

LIT 2607 IntroDUCTION to Literary Theory

Elizabeth Holt

M . W . .

10:10am- 11:30am

OLIN 301

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights This course will introduce students of literature to theoretical and critical discourses animating contemporary literary criticism. We will attend to both the material production and circulation of literary texts in the world, as well as the legacy of the New Criticism with its emphasis on close reading and the radical autonomy of the text. We will ask what it is to read literarily, and we will consider how cultural hegemonies inflect our access to the words on the page. Theoretical interventions in the fields of world literature, translation, postcolonialism, Marxism, New Criticism, deconstruction, and feminism will be the focus of this class. We will read from the works of Benedict Anderson, Matthew Arnold, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, T.S. Eliot, Shoshana Felman, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, Amir Mufti, Walter Ong, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Raymond Williams. Class size: 22