English 215: Critical Methods (Spring 2008)

Professor Arnie Sanders (Section .002 TTh 1:30-2:45)

VM G57 (x6515)  Office Hours: Tuesday-Thursday 12-1 & by app't.  Page last updated: 05/05/2008 03:44:01 PM

        N.B.:   Mary Marchand also teaches a section of 215 (.001) but her syllabus differs from this section's syllabus.  Students in section .001 may make use of information on this web site, but they should use it with ordinary critical caution and cite it properly if they use it in a paper.  If you are currently enrolled in English 200, you should not take English 215.  If you have not yet taken 200, take it before you take 215 or demonstrate to the department chair that you already can write good papers doing close-reading literary analysis.

 New!: 5/5/08--Saturday was the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race as well as the Kentucky Derby.  By now, you may know that the second-place finisher, "Eight Belles," the only filly in the twenty-horse field, broke both her front ankles at the finish line and was "put down," like "My Old Man"'s Gilford.  Awful as it is, this fact should help the Marxists, Deconstructionists, and Cultural Critics think about the ideologies which organize thoroughbred horse racing and name its parts.  For something that might aid such analyses of the "material conditions" of the sport, "Google" the terms "Native Dancer" and "injuries."  All of this competitive foofrah is just my way of encouraging your team spirit for the 2008 English 215 Doubles Critical Methods Tournament (AKA, "the Big Crit-Off").  The "hired guns" assigned to apply each theory have finally been posted.  Feel free to contact team partners and prep in advance so you can dazzle the competition with your interpretive wizardry.  It's not "cheating"--it's being prepared, and if it's good enough mythology for the Boy Scouts, it's good enough for us.

        What strange connection unites what you can see at the Göttingen Library site displaying digital images of the 1282 pages from the State and University Library of Lower Saxony vellum copy of  The Gutenberg Bible (circa 1454) and "Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo," available online at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129?  Before Aguera y Arcas went to work for Microsoft on this new document storage and access product, he had done undergraduate work in computer science at Princeton University with Paul Needham and helped Needham demonstrate that the type forms in the Gutenberg Bible could not have come from traditional "matrices" that would have produced large numbers of identical pieces of type.  This led Needham to propose the sand-casting hypothesis, by which each individual piece of type was individually cast from shapes poked into hard-packed, fine sand by artisans working with specially shaped rods.  Do take a look at both the Gutenberg images, "jaw-dropping" in their own way as a piece of text technology, and the Photosynth demonstration, which just might be the "library" your children will use.

        Click here to read Ferdinand Mount's TLS review of John Styles' The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), in the online version of the April 4, 2008 edition (3-4).  It's an excellent example of New Historicist scholarship that does not tell a politically predictable tale of the poor oppressed masses suffering under the ideological "boot" of the wealthy.  In fact, the reviewer interestingly compares Styles' "thick description"-based conclusions with those of the more traditional historian, E. P. Thompson, whose The Making of the English Working Class (1964) concludes the possessions of the working poor were so few and wretched that they never had more than "a few articles of cotton clothing" (qtd. by Mount 3).  Paintings and engravings of workers dressed in fancy clothes were dismissed as C18 sentimentalism, the Enlightenment equivalent of Renaissance pastoral poetry where the shepherds and shepherdesses were all poets, secretly princes and princesses, and their sheep didn't stink, so to speak.  Mount's reading of Styles' evidence suggests that the poor "went shopping" at country fairs, bought gifts for each other, and (if we include smuggled and stolen goods) had access to more clothing choices than Thompson imagined.  Even more "New Historicist" and "Cult-Crit," English fashion history of the C18 records the privileging of peasant fashions among the aristos, shocking the French court (think Versailles) by dressing the men in handkerchiefs instead of silken cravats, loose seamen's trousers and waistcoats, and other working-class styles, while the aristo women wore milkmaids' aprons.  Read Mount and you'll find out the real answer to the folksong's question: "O dear, what can the matter be? / Johnny's so long at the fair."  Johnny's shopping.

U. Calgary Grammar Tutorial Web Site Link.

Grice's Maxims of Ordinary Language Use  ("literature" violates these maxims in ways readers learn to love and anticipate)

      Summary

        The goal of this course is to alter, enrich, deepen, and complicate your current strategies for reading and interpreting literary texts. We would argue that the chief difference between new and relatively inexperienced readers and experienced ones is not that the latter group has read more but that they have a more extensive repertoire of questions they tend to ask texts. For example, someone new to the field of literary studies might be limited to these kinds of questions: What is this character like? Who is telling the story? Do I trust him or her? What is the significance of the setting? etc. These are important questions, but they also limit the possible responses to and insights into a work. Over the course of this semester, we will generate together a new list of questions. What one quickly discovers is that the kinds of questions you ask texts allow you to be identified with particular groups or schools of critics. Your tendency to be concerned with questions of a work's formal unity, its internal organization, might reveal you to others as a New Critic; questions that uncover the ways in which a work is caught in a web of historical conditions link you to New Historicism; your questions about the portrayal of women, or about whether women write differently than men, suggest your interest in one of the many strains of Feminist criticism. The members of the English Department are much less concerned that you learn these "isms" and their basic tenets--a task, in the end, that no semester-length course could adequately address--than that you leave this class with a fresh array of questions that you are committed to asking the poems, short stories, novels, and plays you will encounter in your junior and senior years of study.

        However, if you are at all interested in graduate study in English, or if you are simply curious about why so many smart people in recent history have spent so much time and passionate energy arguing about theory, you might want to know something about the "Theory Wars" of the 20th century, and how they produced the current state of the profession.  Briefly put, a successive series of revolutions in English Departments from England to America have overthrown one critical school after another until, near the end of the 1990s, the momentum of theoretical innovation seems to have slowed and the carnage within the study of literature has diminished somewhat.  In return for this struggle, readers of literature have discovered new levels of meaning in literary works, and new ways that literature helps to create, as well as to represent, the societies which produced it.

        This interpretive progress was not without its costs.  While the "Theory Wars" raged, scholars in our discipline were willing to destroy each other, socially and professionally, for the sake of ideas they held so dear that no price was too high to pay in order to advance them.  The public, political consequences of some theories arguably have led to the deaths of millions, and the battles within English Departments have resulted in the firings of both senior and junior faculty, and even produced at least one formal challenge to a duel of honor in a state institution very near Maryland.  These powerful ideas have made and broken careers, and have resulted in the emergence of a set of "celebrity" scholars whose influential leadership among proponents of particular theories have permitted them to reject attachment to any individual university for more than a few years, traveling the world from one prestigious appointment to another, carried (as it were) on the wings of theory.  Click here for a very brief overview of The Theory Wars of the 20th Century.

since 1/29/08 reset