English 720-001
Modern Literary Theory
Instr: Kincaid, Andrew
Office: CRT 587; 229-4517
e-mail: akincaid@uwm.edu
Office Hours: TBA
Course Information: T; 6:30-9:10pm; CRT 286
Course Description
This course will introduce graduate students to some of the constitutive texts and formulations that have helped organize the encounter between theory and literature over the last century. We will read representative works that have come to define particular trajectories of thought; i.e., critical movements or "isms." We will consider Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, structuralism, and the "posts"s: post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-modernism. Our goal will be to engage critical and theoretical texts on their own terms, as well as the tensions and disputes that emerge within and among them.
We will also pay attention to the circumstances out of which these theories developed. Critical approaches, like the texts they proclaim to elucidate, do not emerge in a vacuum. Consequently, this course will not only examine some of the principal theoretical methods that have been used to unpack liteary texts during this last century, it will attempt to provide a meta-critique of them. In other words, we will aim to locate the origins, historical and geographical, of critical schools, as well as to grasp their own ideological biases.
The course accepts as a premise the fact that English departments read a lot more than literature nowadays. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, we will chart and critique, wherever possible, the possiblities and limitations afforded by the practice of placing literature in a broader conversation that has as its ultimate goal the illumination of the relationship between discourse and society. In other words, we will read both literary and cultural criticism, as a means of foregrounding what is at stake in critical theory.
In order to remain grounded, and to see the potential of various criticisms, our course will be anchored in a couple of key texts: a Defoe novel and a Beckett play. Each of these central texts will be analyzed from a series of different perspectives, thereby highlighting the promise, the prejudices, and the political biases inherent in whichever methodological approach one brings to one's object.
We will be reading a selection of short stories and poetry in addition to our key texts. Theorists that will be covered include Marx, Foucault, Althusser, Nietzsche, Levi-Strauss, Sassure, Butler, Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas, and Mulvey.
