English 215.001 Syllabus View, Spring 2012 (Rev. 01/03/2012 01:28 PM)
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. Article and Web page titles are indicated by quotation marks, like "Orson Welles – Painter" or "English 105.16, Spring 2010, Syllabus View." Because web pages typically use underscoring to indicate the presence of a hyperlink to another web page or application, italic type will be used, as MLA Style requires, to indicate book, periodical, or Web site titles (Mosses from the Old Manse, Sight and Sound, or British Library: English Short Title Catalog). Italics also are used to set off foreign words or phrases in English text (E.g., "As Bogart and Bergman watch from the restaurant's window, the sound truck's speakers blare the message, 'Die deutschen Truppen Stehen vor den Toren von Paris.'"). Learn to pay attention to the distinction between italics and roman type. This difference that rapidly is being forgotten by those who read only on the Internet, where playing around with type fonts has brought readers to the brink of the anarchic print conventions of the late Seventeenth Century.
Course Introduction
Jan. 24, 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 noon tomorrow, Wednesday 1/26. IMPORTANT: Do not read Hemingway before you read the instructions in the hyperlinked page above!
Jan. 26, Thursday: Reading Reading Protocols / Re-Performing Performances / Interpreting Interpretations: 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
Jan. 31, 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. For a short list of some questions about Plato's Greek terms for key evaluative concepts, click here. In class, we will work closely with those evaluative terms to help us figure out Plato's analysis of poets and poetry. Unless you take extremely good notes, be sure to bring to class printed copies of the Ion and the Republic excerpts.
Feb. 2, 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.
Feb. 6, Tuesday: Psychoanalytic Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 2 (11-52). Click here for a guide to today's discussion. Note that you will need your copy of Hemingway's In Our Time for Thursday's class, and you will need to be familiar with two of its shorter stories to prepare for the first "Working with" paper which is due on Monday.
Feb. 8, 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. 14, Tuesday.: Marxist Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 3 (53-81). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
Feb. 16, 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. 21, Tuesday: (De)Authorizing Literary Discourse: Read "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). 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. 23, Thursday: (De)Authorizing Literary Discourse II: Read "The Affective Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard); Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
New Criticism (revised, renewed, and continued)
Feb. 28, Tuesday: New Criticism: Read Tyson, Chapter 5 (135-67) and Cleanth Brooks, "The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper," A Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (N.Y. Barcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947, rpt. 1975) 167-77 (photocopy). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 1, Thursday: Read E. D. Hirsch, "Objective Interpretation" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). 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 6, Tuesday: Read Tyson, Chapter 7 (209-47) and Saussure, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign" (pages 65-78 in the larger document stored in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 8, Thursday: Read Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
SPRING BREAK, Saturday, March 10 to Sunday, March 18
March 20, Tues.: Structuralism applied--read Raman Selden's demonstration of Structuralist analysis using Miller's Death of a Salesman (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 22, 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
March 27, Tuesday: Read Deconstruction: Tyson, Chapter 8 (249-80); and Raman Selden's demonstration of Deconstructionist methods, Section 12 (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard--it's in the same .pdf file as Selden's chapter on Structuralism!) Click here for the text of Frost's "Mending Wall." Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
March 29, 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 3, 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 5, Thursday: Read Steven Mailloux, "Practical Criticism: The Reader in American Fiction" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard) 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 10, Tuesday: Read Tyson Chapter 4 (83-133) and Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 12, Thursday: Judith Fetterley, "On the Politics of Literature" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard) 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 17, Tuesday: Read Tyson, Chapter 9 (281-315). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 19, Thursday: Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling" and "Ornamental Cookery" from Mythologies (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard--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 25, 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 / What is "the text"?
April 24, 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?" (in the "Course Documents" part of Blackboard). Click here for a guide to today's discussion.
April 26, What is "the text"?: What technology produced the text
we interpret and how does that affect our "performance of the text"?
Readings on Blackboard in "Course Documents": Lisa Rein, "Hello, Grisham--So Long, Hemingway?: With Shelf Space
Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections," The Washington Post,
1/2/07: A01 [see Blackboard "Course Documents"]; Monica Hesse, "Truth: Can You Handle It?," The Washington Post, 4/28/08, M1, M8
[See Blackboard "Course Documents"]. Online article: 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&
In class, we will discuss online reading, the authority of online documents, "wikiality," the status of "rare books" and all printed books as sources of scholarly evidence. In particular, we will reconsider the first and second editions of the Hemingway story, "On the Quai at Smyrna.," as well as variant editions of Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" and the Emily Dickinson poem you know as "XVI." We also will discuss printed books as "collectibles," and print literature as an endangered textual species in the libraries of the future. Ask yourself this crucial question: do texts need books? Click here for an instructive graphical representation of the volume of text produced in various formats (print, digital) since 1986. If you are intrigued by the variants between the Dickinson Bianchi-Hampson (1924) edition of the poem we knew as "XVI" and the scholarly edition by Johnson (1955), you might want to see some photographic facsimiles of unedited manuscripts of this author's poetry. For an example of a successful instance of "Gresham's Law" operating on text quality, see "How the Moby Shakespeare Took Over the Internet" and his related chapters on the 1866 Globe Edition, upon which the Moby Shakespeare was based (Eric M. Johnson, George Mason University M.A. Thesis). Almost all online Shakespeare texts are based on this one, but has anything important happened in Shakespeare's textual scholarship since then? Some links for today's class on digital vs. print texts and digital vs. print reading/interpretation of texts
May 1, Tuesday, the 2010 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 3, Thursday, Discussion of the take-home final exam, application of critical methods to your other courses, critical methods we did not study but might be useful to learn, and whatever else you wish to discuss.
Note--in a typical year, the administrators officially cancel all classes, including this one, at 3:30 on this, the last day of classes, to enable students to leave early for "Convocation." Consider that "the text, itself," for this day. Being, by this time in your careers, highly trained theoretical interpreters of texts and cultural institutions, you may join me in finding it complexly paradoxical (New Criticism!) that administrators, who do not seem to teach nor to learn, would tell those of us who do teach and learn to stop teaching and learning in order to celebrate the scholarly achievement which they thereby prevent in order to attach sign-exchange value to teaching and learning (Marxist!). They do this even though the following day, when no classes are scheduled, is completely free for such an event (Deconstruction!). Let us not deny it (Psychoanalytic!). They are the philosopher kings of the academic state and know the arts of political rule (Platonic!). In fact, if you want to win an award, you had best learn to play by the rules of those who hand out awards (Aristotelian/Horatian!). We should rather expect just such an event from its "authors" (Reader Response!) because administrators also cancelled classes at the beginning of the fall semester to symbolically stop learning in order to celebrate its triumphant beginning (Cultural Criticism!). We will meet from 3:00 until 3:30, but you are all free to leave at that time without prejudice, especially if you have to attend to pick up an award (and congratulations--forgive my rant). I will be happy to stay to speak unofficially with any students who wish to talk about how the interpretive theories and critical methods you learned in this course can be productively used in future classes, or in real world writing. And if you can figure out how to put a Feminist Criticism spin on this whole thing I'll give you extra credit.
May 7, Monday: Take-Home Final Exam due as an attached MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rft) file in an email to me by 5 PM. If you are a graduating senior, please be sure to double check that you have attached the file before you send the email, and make sure you include in the email a request that I confirm receipt of the exam by return email. If you turn on the "Return Receipt" option before you send it, that will add an another layer of safety.