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