Silabus Critical Theory

August    29        Introduction: Syllabus, Theory, Methodology, Method, Approach,

Perspective, and other vague concepts; Theory about Literature, Theory about Literary

Theory, Theory in Literary Studies

September    5      LITERATURE and THEORY Classical Ideas about Literature,

excerpts of Plato’s “Ion” and “Republic; Horace’s “The Art of Poetry;” Paul de Man’s

“Resistance to Theory;” and Northrop Frye’s ““The Function of Criticism in Our Present

Time;” Scholes, “The English Apparatus”

September    12      REPRESENTATION Plato’s “Ion,” Mitchell’s “Representation,”

excerpts from Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire,” Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in

the Attic,” Edward Said, “Jane Austen and the Empire,” Spivak’s “Feminism and Critical

Theory,” Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”

September    19      STRUCTURE Rowe’s “Structure,” Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,”

Saussure’s selections from Course in General Linguistics, Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and

Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Belsey’s “Constructing the Subject:

Deconstructing the Text,” Miller’s “Deconstruction and Heart of Darkness,” Deleuze and

Guattari’s “1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?”

September        26        DESIRE and SELF Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of

the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” and “The Instance of

the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema,” excerpt from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, Bhabha’s “On Mimicry and Men.”

October        3      TEXT and TEXTUAL TECHNOLOGY Barthes’ “From Work to Text”

and “The Death of the Author,” Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction, Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Hayles’s “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The

Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.”

October        10      GENDER and SEXUALITY Cixous’s “Castration or Decapitation?”

Kristeva’s “Foreign Body,” Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and

Colonial Discourses,” Warner’s “Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality,”

October        17      CLASS and ECONOMY Raymond Williams’s “Base and

Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” and “The Country and the City;”  Marx’s

“Alienated Labor,”  “Money as the Symbol of Alienation in the Capitalist Economy, “

and “Wage, Labor and Capital;” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women

Redifining Difference;” Luce Irigiray, “Women on the Market.”

October     24        NATION and EMPIRE excerpt’s from Said’s Orientalism and Culture

and Imperialism, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Parry’s “Reading Signs of the

Empire in Metropolitan Fiction.”

October     31        WRITING and ORALITY Ong’s “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,”

November     7      RACE

November     14      CULTURE and IDEOLOGY Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy,”

November     21      Paper consultations and unresolved issues

November     28      Paper consultations and unresolved issues

December     5      Paper consultations and unresolved issues

December     12      Paper consultations and unresolved issues

December     19      No

Class                                                                                                   Paper Due

December     23 to January 3 UAS