English 215.002 Syllabus View, Spring 2008
Blue underscored text is hyperlinked to documents you should read after you finish reading the day's assigned reading in print or in the PDF files found on the public folder (e.g., "Intentional Fallacy"). Because well-informed users of critical methods always pay attention to who invented the method they are using, theorists' names in the syllabus will be introduced in red bold-face type. This will help you sort out varieties of each critical method which derive from different theorists.
Course Introduction
Jan. 29, Tuesday: Before Tuesday's class, read "Critical Methods and the 20th Century's Theory Wars" to supplement Lois Tyson's nearly a-historical description of theory in Anglo-American literary criticism. Also, review the reading and writing assignment schedule in the weeks below, especially the general instructions for the frequent, short "Working With..." writing assignments. Compare due dates for written work with your other courses' due dates, and plan your semester carefully. Each week, read the "Guide" advice and the instructions for each assignment, making full use of the online materials hyperlinked from each day's assignment. Click here for a guide to today's class discussion. The first writing assignment, a personal Reading Protocol based on a reading of Hemingway's "On the Quai at Smyrna" will be due by 5:00 PM tomorrow, Wednesday 1/30. IMPORTANT: Do not read Hemingway before you read the instructions in the hyperlinked page above!
Jan. 31, Thursday: Discuss reading protocols for "On the Quai at Smyrna" from In Our Time. Discuss our starting principles of interpretation to decide what interpretive methods we share. Do we consider any methods "illegal"? Are all interpretive methods equally good, productive, "legal"? Click here for a guide to today's class discussion.
0: Classical / Early Formal Criticism
Feb. 5, Tuesday: Classical/Early Formal Criticism I: Read Plato, "Ion," [e-text] (click here for "Ion" discussion questions) and Republic excerpts from Books III and X [e-text]. For class, you read the "Ion," the excerpts from Republic III and X. Click here for a guide to today's class discussion.
Feb. 7, Thursday: Classical/Early Formal Criticism II: Read Aristotle, "Poetics" [excerpts w/comments] (click here if you want to read the whole "Poetics," though it's not required), and Horace, Epistle II.3, often called the "Ars Poetica" (click here for Horace Epistle II.3 discussion questions). For class, read the Poetics excerpts and comments, and the "Ars Poetica." Click here for a guide to today's class discussion.
1: Psychoanalytic Criticism
Feb. 12, Tuesday: Psychoanalytic Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 2 (11-52). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
Feb. 14, Thursday: Working with Psychoanalysis. Read Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain" (91-94), and "A Very Short Story" (65-66). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.. Click here for instructions about how to write your "Working With..." assignment, which is due by 9:00 AM, next Monday, as an email or attached Word file sent to me.
2: Marxist Criticism
Feb. 19, Tuesday.: Marxist Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 3 (53-81). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
Feb. 21, Thursday: Working with Marxism. Read Hemingway, Chapter VII of In Our Time (the "interchapter" and "Soldiers Home"), and Chapter X (the "interchapter" and "Cat in the Rain," pages 89-94). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. Click here for instructions about how to write your "Working with..." assignment, which is due by 9:00 AM, next Monday, as an email or attached Word file sent to me
3 : New Criticism
Feb. 26, Tuesday: (De)Authorizing Literary Discourse: Read "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley (public folder--look at the bottom for the earliest postings by Arnie, and if you can't access the "Wimsatt and Beardsley, 'Intentional Fallacy' and 'Affective Fallacy' folders, email me during the day so I can send them to you--don't wait until late at night!). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. You also can access "The Intentional Fallacy" online at Nina Schwartz' English 5349 web site "Seminar in Literary Theory" (SMU).
Feb. 28, Thursday: (De)Authorizing Literary Discourse II: Read "The Affective Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley (public folder--look at the bottom for the earliest postings by Arnie, and if you can't access the "Wimsatt and Beardsley, 'Intentional Fallacy' and 'Affective Fallacy' folders, email me!); Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
New Criticism (revised, renewed, and continued)
March 4, Tuesday: New Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 5 (135-67) and Richard Ohmann,"Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology," from The Politics of Literature (1970) (It's a web page--click on the link). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 6, Thursday: Read E. D. Hirsch, "Objective Interpretation" (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. After class, read Emily Dickinson, XVI and apply New Criticism principles of interpretation to this poem in your "Working With New Criticism" assignment, due by 9:00 AM, next Monday, as an email to me or an attached Word file.
4 : Structuralism and Semiotics
March 11, Tuesday: Read Tyson, Chapter 7 (209-47) and Saussure, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign" and "Static and Evolutionary Linguistics" (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. . . .
March 13, Thursday: Read Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
SPRING BREAK, Saturday, March 15 to Sunday, March 23
March 25, Tues.: Structuralism applied--read Raman Selden's demonstration of Structuralist analysis using Miller's Death of a Salesman (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 27, Thurs.: Structuralism applied--by us. Read and be prepared to discuss binary oppositions in Hemingway's "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" from In Our Time. Click here for a guide to today's discussion. Click here for instructions for writing the "Working With Structuralism" paper on "A Very Short Story," due 9 AM next Monday.
5: Deconstruction
April 1, Tuesday: Read Deconstruction: Tyson, Chapter 8 (249-80); and Raman Selden's demonstration of Deconstructionist methods, Section 12 (see public folder--it's in the same .pdf file as the Structuralist application!) Click here for the text of Frost's "Mending Wall." Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 3, Thursday: Reread Dickinson's poem XVI and apply both a New Critical and a Structuralist reading to determine its main "tensions" and its primary binary oppositions. Click here for a guide to today's discussion. Working with Deconstruction: Wheatley’s "On Being Brought from Africa," due 9:00 AM next Monday, as an email to me or as an attached Word file.
6 : Reader-Response Criticism
April 8, Tuesday: Read Tyson, Chapter 6 (169-207) and Hawthorne’s "Rappaccini’s Daughter" to be prepared for Mailloux' chapter analyzing the story on Thursday. For an acceptable online version of "Rappaccini's Daughter," click here. For "Some Theoretical Points of Contact Among Reader-Response Critics," click here. Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 10, Thursday: Read Steven Mailloux, "Practical Criticism: The Reader in American Fiction" (public folder) and Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter." For an acceptable online version of "Rappaccini's Daughter," click here. Click here to a guide to today's discussion. Working with Reader Response: A Temporal Reading of Kate Chopin’s "The Story of an Hour" due 9:00 AM, next Monday, as an email to me or as an attached Word file.
READ AHEAD--if you have not already done so, you will need to be familiar with Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" to follow Fetterley's analysis for Thursday of next week. To read an acceptable online version of "The Birthmark" before Fetterly for Thursday, click here.
7: Feminist Criticism
April 15, Tuesday: Read Tyson Chapter 4 (83-133) and Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 17, Thursday: Judith Fetterley, "On the Politics of Literature" (public folder) and an excerpt of her interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark." (The hyperlink will take you to this short story.) Click here for a guide to today's discussion. Working with Feminist Criticism: describe at least one flavor of feminist criticism and its critical methods, and apply them to one limited pattern of evidence in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" due 9:00 AM, next Monday, as an email to me or as an attached Word file. For an acceptable online version of "Rappaccini's Daughter," click here.
8: New Historicism and Cultural Criticism
April 22, Tuesday: Read Tyson, Chapter 9 (281-315). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 24, Thursday: Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling" and "Ornamental Cookery" from Mythologies (public folder--both essays are in the same .pdf file!). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. The "Working With Cultural Criticism" paper is due Monday, April 28, at 9:00. Be sure to take time to make observations of a non-textual category of cultural production, to develop its structural rules, and to do a politically-informed critique of the rules and their supporting values. If you only report the rules, you aren't yet doing cultural criticism. You have to detect the hidden political and economic forces driving the rules.
Content- and Context-Sensitive Critical Pluralism / The "New Bibliography" and "Archeology of the Text"
April 29, Tuesday: Read Stanley Fish, excerpts from the chapters "Is There a Text in This Class?"; "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One," and "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?" (public folder). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
May 1, "Archeology of Text and Copy-Specific Bibliography": What technology produced the text
we interpret and how does that affect our "performance of the text"?
Readings: Lisa Rein, "Hello, Grisham--So Long, Hemingway?: With Shelf Space
Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections," The Washington Post,
1/2/07: A01 [Public Folder Posting--down near the bottom of the stack]; Monica
Hesse, "Truth: Can You Handle It?," The Washington Post, 4/28/08, M1, M8
[Public Folder Posting--look at the TOP of the stack!]; Ralf Schneider, "Hypertext Narrative and the Reader: A View from
Cognitive Theory," European Journal of English Studies, 9:2 (August 2005)
197-208 (Available online at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=17980481&
May 6, Tuesday, Course Evaluations and the 2008 English 215 Doubles Critical Methods Tournament (AKA, "the Big Crit-Off")--Read Hemingway's "My Old Man" (from In Our Time) and Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me" (follow hyperlink to Luminarium.org's text of the poem, which comes from the editio princeps or first print edition, a volume edited for the press by Richard Tottel and known to modern scholars as Tottel's Miscellany [titled by Tottel, Songes and Sonnettes] (1557), ) and/or Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They fle from me that sometyme did me seke" (a version edited from Egerton Manuscript 2271, a document thought to be Wyatt's and written in his own hand). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. I will group you with critical methods based on your (best!) performance in the previous Working With assignments. Each team will have 20 minutes to pick a "best text" on which to employ the critical method, and to decide what the method would generate at least one insight about the text's significance. You do not have to do a complete interpretation of the text using the theory--just generate a non-obvious insight that would be invisible to readers who did not apply the theory and explain briefly what kind of thesis a paper might develop from that insight. This is practical preparation for your take-home final exam essay in which you will defend the critical methods you choose to use.
May 8, no class--Arnie will be on the spot, delivering a paper at a medievalist conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
May 12, Monday: Take-Home Final Exam due as an attached MS-Word file in an email to me by 5 PM.