History and Principles of Literary Criticism

 

         Tentative Reading Schedule

 

Week 1, Sept 4-6             Introduction

Ong, selections from Orality and Literacy (hand out)

 

Week 2: Representation–Simulation and Mimesis

Sept 11            Plato, The Republic, Book X and The Ion

Sept 13            Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”

                

Week 3: Imitation and Poetry

Sept 18             Aristotle, The Poetics

Sept 20            Horace, The Art of Poetry

Sidney, An Apology for Poetry            

 

Week 4: Defining the Author and Critic

Sept 25            Foucault, “What is an Author?”

Rose, “The Question of Literary Property”

Sept 27            Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Pope, An Essay on Criticism

 

Week 5: Aesthetics and Taste

Oct 2               Eagleton, “The Law of the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke”

Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste”

Oct 4               Wollstonecraft, from Vindication of the Rights of Man

Williams, from A Tour of Switzerland

 

Week 6: The Communities of Readers

Oct 9                           Anderson, from Imagined Communities

Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (hand out)

Oct 11             Klancher, “Introduction: Historical Audiences and Social Theory”

Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”

 

Essay One Due (max. 1500 words)  

 

Week 7:  Criticism, Prophecy and Print Technology

Oct 16               Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Carlyle, “Signs of the Times”

Oct 18             Shelley, A Defence of Poetry                        

 

Week 8:  Culture and Industry                                  

Oct 23             Eisenstein, “The End of the Book?”

Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”

Oct 25             Uglow, “Introduction: ‘Possibility’”

Pater, from Studies in the History of the Renaissance

 

Week 9:  Issues in Modernism           

Oct 30             T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Felski, “Modernity and Feminism” (hand out)

Nov 1                          Woolf, “Shakespeare’s Sister”

 

 

Week 10:  Reproduction and the Copy

Nov 6                          Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Nov 8                          Schwartz, “Ditto”

Kittler, “Technological Media”

 

Week 11:  From Text to Hypertext

Nov 13            Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play”

Nov 15            Barthes, “From Work to Text”

Landow, from Hypertext

 

Week 12: Performing the (Textualized) Body

Nov 20            Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (hand out)

Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”

Nov 22             Grosz, “Feminism and the Crisis of Reason”

 

 

Essay Two Due (max. 2500 words)

 

Week 13: Postmodern Aesthetics

Nov 27             Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

Nov 29            Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism”