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Note to NAVSA readers: what follows is a standard undergraduate survey of Literary Theory supplemented with a description and a handful of readings to help students engage the material from a post-secular and even theological vantage. I have highlighted these supplemental elements in yellow.

English 4413: Literary Theory MWF 12:40-1:30 | Williams 1

Joseph McQueen | joseph.mcqueen@northwestu.edu Office Hours: MWF 7:00-8:00, 9:00-11:00, & by appointment

Office location: Fee 13

Course Description

By what standards do we judge literature? Who or what is the source of literature? What purpose does literature serve? How should we interpret literature? What, for that matter, is literature? Such questions have occupied philosophers, poets, and literary critics for over two millennia, and English 4413 will expose you to the ongoing debate surrounding these topics. Our inquiry into the history of literary criticism and theory will also draw us into broader concerns, such as the very nature of beauty and reality—or what philosophers call aesthetics and metaphysics, respectively. To put it simply, what a theorist, philosopher, or poet thinks about literature will often flow quite directly from what he or she thinks about the whole of reality. So, thinking about literary theory will allow us to connect literature to the big questions of human existence. Exciting, right? We will start in ancient Greece and end in the twentieth century with theories that approach literature from the political perspectives of race, class, and gender. But we will not only learn these theories; we’ll use them to interpret primary texts, including poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti as well as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.

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Finally, the course will take seriously the recent words of Stanley Fish—one of the most famous living literary theorists—about the future of literary theory: “When Jacques Derrida [another famous theorist] died, I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.” In response to Fish’s provocative reply, we will pause three times during the semester for “theological interventions,” during which we will consider texts that respond from a theological perspective to the theories we have been reading. The class will thereby bring us up to the current moment in the field of literary studies, which, as Fish rightly anticipated, is experiencing a “religious turn.” Welcome to English 4413!

Required Materials

You will need David Richter’s The Critical Tradition: Shorter Edition (ISBN: 978-1319011185) and the third edition of Hans Bertens’s Literary Theory: The Basics (ISBN: 978-0415538077). For these two texts, make sure to have the editions listed and pictured here. We will also be using the Penguin edition of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (ISBN: 978-0141439679) and poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti included in volume 2 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. I will post copies of

Hopkins’s and Rossetti’s poems to Discovery, so you will not need to buy the Norton anthology if you do not already own it. Please Note: You must have access to all assigned readings during each class meeting. If you do not bring your textbook to class, you will be counted absent without excuse.

Assignments 20% Reading Quizzes: To contribute to class discussion, you will need to have read the

assigned material carefully. Many class sessions will start with a short quiz where you will demonstrate that you have engaged the texts and are prepared to participate. The quizzes are not listed on the schedule because they will happen so frequently that you should come prepared for one anytime you have assigned reading. An absence will count as a zero on the quiz for that day. You cannot make up quizzes, but I will drop your three lowest scores.

20% Reading Notes: To help guide you through these dense texts, I provide a series of

reading questions for each session. Get in the habit of taking notes with these

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questions. Four times throughout the semester, you will submit a typed copy of your notes for the day. Your notes should respond to each of the reading questions for that session with a short paragraph (3-5 sentences). Submit your notes on the same day we cover the relevant reading—so, for instance, if you want your notes on Marx to count as one of your four submissions, turn in those notes during the session when we discuss Marx. Your four submissions should be completed no later than the deadlines listed in the syllabus schedule.

20% Close Reading Essay: In this 1200-word paper, you will use the concepts of the

New Criticism to interpret either a Hopkins or Rossetti poem or a small section of Hard Times. You will advance one main interpretive claim, which you will support with textual evidence. See the assignment section on Discovery for further directions.

20 % Theoretical Essay: In this 2500-word paper, you will choose one of the theories we

study in the latter part of the course, and you will use that theory to analyze Hopkins’s or Rossetti’s poetry or Hard Times. You will engage 10-15 scholarly and theoretical sources in addition to the primary text. See the assignment section on Discovery for further directions.

20% Final Exam: The final will be comprehensive and will give you the chance to

demonstrate your understanding of literary criticism and theory from Plato to the twentieth century. To succeed on the final, you will need to read carefully and to take notes on the reading questions, class lectures, and class discussion.

Schedule

M 26 August

Topics: Introduction to the course; syllabus Reading Due: M.H. Abrams’s map of theories (Richter’s Introduction to CT 1-6); Selections from Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (Discovery)

W 28 August

Topics: Overview of New Criticism Reading Due: Bertens, chapter 1 (4-27)

F 30 August

Topics: New Criticism; the OED; discuss close reading essay Reading Due: Brooks, “My Credo: Formalist Criticism” (Discovery) and “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (CT 449-456)

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M 2 September

Labor Day No Class

W 4 September

Topics: New Criticism and authorship Reading Due: Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (CT 461-469)

F 6 September

Topics: Poetry: madness or divine inspiration? Reading Due: Plato, Ion (CT 25-28, 37-45)

M 9 September

Topics: Poetry, mimesis, and truth Reading Due: Aristotle, selections from Poetics (CT 46-57)

W 11 September

Topics: Classical decorum Reading Due: Horace, The Art of Poetry (CT 73-85)

F 13 September

No Class (Get ahead on Hard Times and other primary sources.

Think about your close reading.)

M 16 September

Topics: Poetry and divine participation Reading Due: Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (CT 112-129)

W 18 September

Topics: FIRST NOTES SUBMISSION NO LATER THAN THIS DAY; Augustan decorum Viewing Due: Pope, Parts I and II of An Essay on Criticism (CT 146-155)

F 20 September

Topics: The Romantic revolution Reading Due: Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (CT 203-217)

M 23 September

Topics: Criticism and culture against anarchy Reading Due: Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (CT 262-278)

W 25 September

Topics: Art for art’s sake Reading Due: Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (Discovery)

F 27 September

Topics: Engaging poetry theoretically Reading Due: Hopkins’s and Rossetti’s poetry (Discovery)

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M 30 September

Topics: Engaging narrative theoretically Reading Due: Hard Times, Book I (Penguin edition 7-108)

W 2 October

Topics: Engaging narrative theoretically Reading Due: Hard Times, Book II (Penguin edition 109-212)

F 4 October

Topics: Engaging narrative theoretically Reading Due: Hard Times, Book III (Penguin edition 213-288)

M 7 October

Topics: Theological intervention I Reading Due: John of Damascus, Treatise I from On the Divine Images (Discovery)

W 9 October

Topics: Introduction to Russian formalism Reading Due: Bertens, chapter 2 (28-45)

F 11 October

Topics: CLOSE READING ESSAY DUE; Introduction to French structuralism Reading Due: Bertens, chapter 3 (46-66)

M 14 October

Topics: Introduction to Marxism and feminism; discuss theoretical paper Viewing Due: Bertens, chapter 4 (67-89)

W 16 October

Topics: Introduction to deconstruction Reading Due: Bertens, chapter 5 (102-122)

F 18 October

Reading Day No Class

M 21 October

Topics: SECOND NOTES SUBMISSION NO LATER THAN THIS DAY; Introduction to poststructuralism Reading Due: Bertens, chapter 6 (123-143)

W 23 October

Topics: Formalism, literariness, and defamiliarization Reading Due: Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (CT 426-436)

F 25 October

Topics: Structuralism and the sign Reading Due: Saussure, selections from Course in General Linguistics (CT 492-502)

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M 28 October

Topics: Structuralism against liberal humanism Reading Due: Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” (CT 503-511)

W 30 October

Topics: The foundations of poststructuralism and deconstruction Reading Due: Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and selections from Twilight of the Idols (Discovery)

F 1 November

Topics: Deconstruction and the search for a center Reading Due: Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (CT 531-542)

M 4 November

Topics: Power, knowledge, and authorship Reading Due: Foucault, “What is and Author?” (CT 520-530)

W 6 November

Topics: Psychoanalytic foundations for Lacan Reading Due: Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” and “Medusa’s Head” (CT 309-317)

F 8 November

Topics: Psychoanalysis meets poststructuralism Reading Due: Richter’s introduction to Lacan (CT 632-636); Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (CT 643-649)

M 11 November

Topics: THIRD NOTES SUBMISSION NO LATER THAN THIS DAY; Theological intervention II Reading Due: David Bentley Hart, selections from The Beauty of the Infinite and video lecture “Beauty, Form, and Violence” (Discovery)

W 13 November

Topics: The foundations of political approaches to literature Reading Due: Marx, “The Alienation of Labor” (CT 247-255); Woolf, “Shakespeare’s Sister” from A Room of One’s Own (CT 370-375)

F 15 November

Topics: Marxism against liberal humanism Reading Due: Althusser, selections from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (CT 738-746)

M 18 November

Topics: Politics and the novel’s many voices Reading Due: Bahktin, “Heteroglossia in the Novel” (CT 349-351, 362-368)

W 20 November

Topics: Sisterhood against patriarchy Reading Due: Gilbert and Gubar, selections from “Infection in the Sentence” (CT 902-915)

F 22 November

Topics: Woman as object of the male gaze Reading Due: Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (CT 667-675)

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M 25 November

Conferences for Theoretical Paper

W 27 November

Thanksgiving Break No Class

F 29 December

Thanksgiving Break No Class

M 2 December

Conferences for Theoretical Paper

W 4 December

Conferences for Theoretical Paper

F 6 December

Topics: FOURTH NOTES SUBMISSION NO LATER THAN THIS DAY; Theological intervention III Reading Due: Terry Eagleton, “The Scum of the Earth” from Reason, Faith, and Revolution (Discovery)

M 9 December

Topics: THEORETICAL ESSAY DUE; Course evaluations; final exam review Reading Due:

W 11 December

Final Exam 1:00-3:00 in Williams 1