English 461: Literary Criticism (Senior Seminar)
Professor: E. Derek Taylor
Fall 2014
Office: Grainger 306
Office Hours: MTWF 3:00-4:00 (and by appointment)
Phone: 395-2748
e-mail: [email protected]
website: [email protected]
ENGLISH 461. Literary Criticism: Senior Seminar. Study of the history and aims of literary criticism from Plato and Aristotle to the present, including oral and written criticism of literary works. Capstone course for English majors. Enrollment limited to seniors and those with permission of instructor. 3 credits. WR (with C- or higher).
Texts:
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Norton, 2007.
Richter, David. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed.
Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2007.
Course Objectives. This course has three primary objectives:
1. Exposure. Students will read selections from major works of literary criticism, ranging from Plato’s dismissal of poets and poetry to Aristotle’s defense of the human capacity for mimesis, from Pope’s neoclassical aesthetic strictures to Wordsworth’s romantic attempt to redefine the work of poetry, from Roland Barthes’s pronouncement of the “death of the author” to Stanley Fish’s announcement of the birth of the reader. The readings will be challenging but enlightening for those students of literature who grapple with them honestly and persistently.
2. Participation. The success of the class will depend in large part upon whether or not students come prepared to discuss ideas, questions, annoyances, or delights elicited by the readings. In light of this fact, students should expect regular reading quizzes. Ideas and texts from other classes are not only relevant to class discussion, but welcome—indeed, making connections to other English courses, as evidenced by the written assignments, will be a central focus of our class.
3. Articulation.
i. Students will submit a single short essay (4-5 pages; 1500 words) in which they apply one (possibly more) of the readings from our class to a work of literature encountered in another class. Essays may not be double submitted—a point that will be stressed in class. At least one peer-reviewed outside source is required.
ii. We will form into small reading groups early in the semester; each week, groups will be responsible for “meeting” (virtually or in person) for 30 minutes in order to discuss Shakespeare’s King Lear in light of the critical readings for the day. Each group will be responsible for submitting a weekly report that summarizes particularly pressing ideas, problems, and questions that emerged during the meeting. These reports may be informal and inchoate but must be thorough and thoughtful; they are due no later than 5:00 pm each Tuesday before class (an email attachment is fine, but feel free to drop off a hard copy if you prefer).
iii. The class will hold an academic conference on Saturday, December 6 at which each student will present a conference paper (10 pages) on a topic of his or her choosing. Both an abstract of the paper and an annotated bibliography will be due before the conference; we will meet to look over drafts of your paper at least twice before you submit/present the final product. The take-home final exam will require you to be familiar with major ideas, authors, and critical movements.
Grades: Student grades will be determined according to the following model:
--Short Essay: 10%
--Reading-group: 10%
--Annotated Bibliography and Abstract: 10%
--Conference Paper: 30%
--Out-of-class Final Exam: 20%
--Quizzes: 20%
--Participation: + or -
Attendance, Tardiness, Late Papers, Plagiarism:
Students are expected to attend classes regularly. ONLY illness, official university business, and emergencies permit the make-up of work missed, and all such absences must be documented. Unexcused absences totaling 10% or more of class meetings will result in a one letter grade penalty; absences totaling 25% or more, excused or otherwise, will result in an F for the course.
Late work will not be accepted in this class. Turn in papers on time, and be in class on the day of all exams. Students may not make up missed quizzes.
Honor Code:
All work is governed by the Longwood University Honor Code. Written work must contain the pledge in writing and be signed. Students should read closely the section on plagiarism in the Longwood Style Manual.
Class Schedule: (I reserve the right to make changes to this schedule by giving oral notification in class. Absence from one class is never an excuse for being unprepared for subsequent classes.)
Week 1
T. 8-26. Introduction.
Week 2
T. 9-2. Classical Thought from Greece and Rome
--Plato, From The Republic (25-38)
--Aristotle, From Poetics (55-81)
--Horace, The Art of Poetry (82-94)
--King Lear, Act 1
Week 3
T. 9-9. Renaissance to Neoclassical
--Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (132-159)
--Alexander Pope, Part I of An Essay on Criticism (198-202)
--Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4, Rasselas, Chapter 10, and From Preface to Shakespeare (210-230)
--King Lear, Act 2
Week 4
T. 9-16. Romanticism
--Immanuel Kant, From Critique of Judgment (247-274)
--William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (304-318)
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare’s Judgment and From Biographia Literaria (319-329)
--John Keats, From a Letter to Benjamin Bailey and From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats (330-333)
--Raymond Williams, The Romantic Artist (364-368)
--King Lear, Act 3
Week 5
T. 9-23. Major Voices from the Nineteenth Century
--Karl Marx, The Alienation of Labor, Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions, and On Greek Art in its Time (397-411)
--Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and From The Study of Poetry (412-434)
--Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense and From Twilight of the Idols (452-461)
--King Lear, Act 4
Week 6
T. 9-30. Major Voices from the early Twentieth Century
--Sigmund Freud, From The Interpretation of Dreams (497-509) and “Medusa’s Head” (533)
--T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (534-541)
--W. E. B. Du Bois, [On Double Consciousness] from The Souls of Black Folk and Criteria of Negro Art (565-574)
--Virginia Woolf, [Shakespeare’s Sister] from A Room of One’s Own, [Austen-Brontë-Eliot] from A Room of One’s Own, and [The Androgynous Vision] from A Room of One’s Own (596-610)
--Simone De Beauvoir, “Myths: Of Women in Five Authors” (635-640)
--King Lear, Act 5
Week 7
T. 10-7.
--Formalisms (749-763)
--Cleanth Brooks, From My Credo: Formalist Criticism and Irony as a Principle of Structure (797-806)
--W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy (810-818).
--Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature (691-701)
--Erich Auerbach, Odysseus’ Scar (704-717).
--King Lear, Michael Warren, "Quarto and Folio King Lear" (181-194)
Week 8
T. 10-14. Class Canceled for Fall Break. Submit Short Essay (email as an attachment) by 9:00 pm.
Week 9
T. 10-21.
--Structuralism and Deconstruction (819-841)
--Ferdinand de Saussure, From Nature of the Linguistic Sign (841-844)
--Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth (860-868)
--Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (871-877)
--Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play[. . .] and Differance (914-926; 932-949)
--King Lear, Lynda E. Boose, "From The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare" (194-208)
Week 10
T. 10-28.
--Reader-Response Theory (962-978)
--Psychoanalytic Theory (read only 1106-111)
--Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Elevation of the Historicality of Understanding to the Status of the Hermeneutical Principle (718-737)
--Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach (1001-1014)
--Stanley Fish, How to Recognize a Poem When you See One (1022-1030)
--Harold Bloom, A Meditation upon Priority (1155-1160)
--Peter Brooks, Freud’s Masterplot (1161-1171)
--King Lear: Stanley Cavell, “From The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” (243-254)
Week 11
T. 11-4.
--Marxist Criticism (read only 1198-1207)
--New Historicism and Cultural Studies (read only 1320-1329)
--Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1232-1249)
--Louis Althusser, From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1263-1272)
--Lawrence Buell, The Ecocritical Insurgency (1432-1442)
--Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1442-1447)
--King Lear: R.A. Foakes, “From Hamlet versus Lear” (240-43); Margo Heinemann, "Demystifying the Mystery of State": King Lear and the World Upside Down" (227-240)
Week 12
T. 11-11.
--Feminist Literary Criticism (read only 1502-1512)
--Gender Studies and Queer Theory (read only 1614-1624)
--Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, From Infection in the Sentence (1531-1544)
--Michel Foucault, From The History of Sexuality (1627-1636)
--Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman (1637-1642)
--Laura Kipnis, (Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler (1484-1501)
--Judith Halberstam, From the Introduction to Female Masculinity (1734-1752)
--King Lear, Janet Adelman, "From Suffocating Mothers" (209-226)
Week 13
T. 11-18.
--Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies (read only 1753-1764)
--Theorizing Postmodernism (1920-1932)
--Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa (1783-1790)
--Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” (1850-1858)
--Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (1935-1946)
--Bell Hooks, Postmodern Blackness (2008-2014).
--Sign up for three conferences:
· a 10-minute “brainstorm” conference (Wednesday 11-19 or Friday 11-21)
· a 30-minute conferences (Monday, 11-24 or Tuesday, 11-25), and
· a second 30-minute conference (Monday, 12-1 or Tuesday, 12-2).
Saturday. 11-22.
--Take-home Final Exam due. Email it as an attachment before 6:00 pm.
Week 14
T. 11-25. Abstract due (email as an attachment by 9:00 pm); Individual Conferences—no class
Week 15
T. 12-2. Annotated Bibliography due. Individual Conferences—no class
Sat. 12-6. Senior Seminar Conference. This will be an all-day affair, and your presence is required. Bring a clean draft of your paper for submission.
Week 16
T. 12-9. MFAT (in our regular classroom—exam period lasts from 6:30-9:00).
Professor: E. Derek Taylor
Fall 2014
Office: Grainger 306
Office Hours: MTWF 3:00-4:00 (and by appointment)
Phone: 395-2748
e-mail: [email protected]
website: [email protected]
ENGLISH 461. Literary Criticism: Senior Seminar. Study of the history and aims of literary criticism from Plato and Aristotle to the present, including oral and written criticism of literary works. Capstone course for English majors. Enrollment limited to seniors and those with permission of instructor. 3 credits. WR (with C- or higher).
Texts:
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Norton, 2007.
Richter, David. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed.
Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2007.
Course Objectives. This course has three primary objectives:
1. Exposure. Students will read selections from major works of literary criticism, ranging from Plato’s dismissal of poets and poetry to Aristotle’s defense of the human capacity for mimesis, from Pope’s neoclassical aesthetic strictures to Wordsworth’s romantic attempt to redefine the work of poetry, from Roland Barthes’s pronouncement of the “death of the author” to Stanley Fish’s announcement of the birth of the reader. The readings will be challenging but enlightening for those students of literature who grapple with them honestly and persistently.
2. Participation. The success of the class will depend in large part upon whether or not students come prepared to discuss ideas, questions, annoyances, or delights elicited by the readings. In light of this fact, students should expect regular reading quizzes. Ideas and texts from other classes are not only relevant to class discussion, but welcome—indeed, making connections to other English courses, as evidenced by the written assignments, will be a central focus of our class.
3. Articulation.
i. Students will submit a single short essay (4-5 pages; 1500 words) in which they apply one (possibly more) of the readings from our class to a work of literature encountered in another class. Essays may not be double submitted—a point that will be stressed in class. At least one peer-reviewed outside source is required.
ii. We will form into small reading groups early in the semester; each week, groups will be responsible for “meeting” (virtually or in person) for 30 minutes in order to discuss Shakespeare’s King Lear in light of the critical readings for the day. Each group will be responsible for submitting a weekly report that summarizes particularly pressing ideas, problems, and questions that emerged during the meeting. These reports may be informal and inchoate but must be thorough and thoughtful; they are due no later than 5:00 pm each Tuesday before class (an email attachment is fine, but feel free to drop off a hard copy if you prefer).
iii. The class will hold an academic conference on Saturday, December 6 at which each student will present a conference paper (10 pages) on a topic of his or her choosing. Both an abstract of the paper and an annotated bibliography will be due before the conference; we will meet to look over drafts of your paper at least twice before you submit/present the final product. The take-home final exam will require you to be familiar with major ideas, authors, and critical movements.
Grades: Student grades will be determined according to the following model:
--Short Essay: 10%
--Reading-group: 10%
--Annotated Bibliography and Abstract: 10%
--Conference Paper: 30%
--Out-of-class Final Exam: 20%
--Quizzes: 20%
--Participation: + or -
Attendance, Tardiness, Late Papers, Plagiarism:
Students are expected to attend classes regularly. ONLY illness, official university business, and emergencies permit the make-up of work missed, and all such absences must be documented. Unexcused absences totaling 10% or more of class meetings will result in a one letter grade penalty; absences totaling 25% or more, excused or otherwise, will result in an F for the course.
Late work will not be accepted in this class. Turn in papers on time, and be in class on the day of all exams. Students may not make up missed quizzes.
Honor Code:
All work is governed by the Longwood University Honor Code. Written work must contain the pledge in writing and be signed. Students should read closely the section on plagiarism in the Longwood Style Manual.
Class Schedule: (I reserve the right to make changes to this schedule by giving oral notification in class. Absence from one class is never an excuse for being unprepared for subsequent classes.)
Week 1
T. 8-26. Introduction.
Week 2
T. 9-2. Classical Thought from Greece and Rome
--Plato, From The Republic (25-38)
--Aristotle, From Poetics (55-81)
--Horace, The Art of Poetry (82-94)
--King Lear, Act 1
Week 3
T. 9-9. Renaissance to Neoclassical
--Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (132-159)
--Alexander Pope, Part I of An Essay on Criticism (198-202)
--Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4, Rasselas, Chapter 10, and From Preface to Shakespeare (210-230)
--King Lear, Act 2
Week 4
T. 9-16. Romanticism
--Immanuel Kant, From Critique of Judgment (247-274)
--William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (304-318)
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare’s Judgment and From Biographia Literaria (319-329)
--John Keats, From a Letter to Benjamin Bailey and From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats (330-333)
--Raymond Williams, The Romantic Artist (364-368)
--King Lear, Act 3
Week 5
T. 9-23. Major Voices from the Nineteenth Century
--Karl Marx, The Alienation of Labor, Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions, and On Greek Art in its Time (397-411)
--Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and From The Study of Poetry (412-434)
--Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense and From Twilight of the Idols (452-461)
--King Lear, Act 4
Week 6
T. 9-30. Major Voices from the early Twentieth Century
--Sigmund Freud, From The Interpretation of Dreams (497-509) and “Medusa’s Head” (533)
--T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (534-541)
--W. E. B. Du Bois, [On Double Consciousness] from The Souls of Black Folk and Criteria of Negro Art (565-574)
--Virginia Woolf, [Shakespeare’s Sister] from A Room of One’s Own, [Austen-Brontë-Eliot] from A Room of One’s Own, and [The Androgynous Vision] from A Room of One’s Own (596-610)
--Simone De Beauvoir, “Myths: Of Women in Five Authors” (635-640)
--King Lear, Act 5
Week 7
T. 10-7.
--Formalisms (749-763)
--Cleanth Brooks, From My Credo: Formalist Criticism and Irony as a Principle of Structure (797-806)
--W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy (810-818).
--Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature (691-701)
--Erich Auerbach, Odysseus’ Scar (704-717).
--King Lear, Michael Warren, "Quarto and Folio King Lear" (181-194)
Week 8
T. 10-14. Class Canceled for Fall Break. Submit Short Essay (email as an attachment) by 9:00 pm.
Week 9
T. 10-21.
--Structuralism and Deconstruction (819-841)
--Ferdinand de Saussure, From Nature of the Linguistic Sign (841-844)
--Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth (860-868)
--Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (871-877)
--Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play[. . .] and Differance (914-926; 932-949)
--King Lear, Lynda E. Boose, "From The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare" (194-208)
Week 10
T. 10-28.
--Reader-Response Theory (962-978)
--Psychoanalytic Theory (read only 1106-111)
--Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Elevation of the Historicality of Understanding to the Status of the Hermeneutical Principle (718-737)
--Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach (1001-1014)
--Stanley Fish, How to Recognize a Poem When you See One (1022-1030)
--Harold Bloom, A Meditation upon Priority (1155-1160)
--Peter Brooks, Freud’s Masterplot (1161-1171)
--King Lear: Stanley Cavell, “From The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” (243-254)
Week 11
T. 11-4.
--Marxist Criticism (read only 1198-1207)
--New Historicism and Cultural Studies (read only 1320-1329)
--Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1232-1249)
--Louis Althusser, From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1263-1272)
--Lawrence Buell, The Ecocritical Insurgency (1432-1442)
--Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1442-1447)
--King Lear: R.A. Foakes, “From Hamlet versus Lear” (240-43); Margo Heinemann, "Demystifying the Mystery of State": King Lear and the World Upside Down" (227-240)
Week 12
T. 11-11.
--Feminist Literary Criticism (read only 1502-1512)
--Gender Studies and Queer Theory (read only 1614-1624)
--Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, From Infection in the Sentence (1531-1544)
--Michel Foucault, From The History of Sexuality (1627-1636)
--Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman (1637-1642)
--Laura Kipnis, (Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler (1484-1501)
--Judith Halberstam, From the Introduction to Female Masculinity (1734-1752)
--King Lear, Janet Adelman, "From Suffocating Mothers" (209-226)
Week 13
T. 11-18.
--Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies (read only 1753-1764)
--Theorizing Postmodernism (1920-1932)
--Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa (1783-1790)
--Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” (1850-1858)
--Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (1935-1946)
--Bell Hooks, Postmodern Blackness (2008-2014).
--Sign up for three conferences:
· a 10-minute “brainstorm” conference (Wednesday 11-19 or Friday 11-21)
· a 30-minute conferences (Monday, 11-24 or Tuesday, 11-25), and
· a second 30-minute conference (Monday, 12-1 or Tuesday, 12-2).
Saturday. 11-22.
--Take-home Final Exam due. Email it as an attachment before 6:00 pm.
Week 14
T. 11-25. Abstract due (email as an attachment by 9:00 pm); Individual Conferences—no class
Week 15
T. 12-2. Annotated Bibliography due. Individual Conferences—no class
Sat. 12-6. Senior Seminar Conference. This will be an all-day affair, and your presence is required. Bring a clean draft of your paper for submission.
Week 16
T. 12-9. MFAT (in our regular classroom—exam period lasts from 6:30-9:00).