Course overview
This course seeks to provide a forum in which students can grow acquainted and conversant with a broad range of theoretical ideas and approaches to literary works and production. In effect, students will be provided with contexts and intellectual tools with which to examine the concepts and relationships inherent in the "Text / Community / Discourse" framework of study offered in the graduate program.
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| Marking scheme Evaluation will be based upon two seminar presentations (each worth 10% of the final grade), one written response to a seminar (worth 15%), seminar participation (worth 15%), and one essay (worth 50%). Details of these assignments are given below. The last day for withdrawal without academic penalty from a D2 course is November 15. Students are invited to discuss their progress in the course with the instructor within one week of this deadline if they wish to exercise their right to know 15% of their grade.
All assigned work must be submitted in hard copy: emailed assignments will not be accepted. Note that completion of all assignments is required to pass the course. Attendance and active participation in seminar are expected: students who miss more than two seminars (without a signed note from a physician) forfeit the whole of their participation mark.
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Required Texts
- Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
- Vincent Leitch et al, eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd ed.)
- Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition
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Late policy
Late assignments will be penalized at the rate of five percent (5%) per day. Papers more than ten days late may not be accepted: students should see the course instructor. Only certified emergencies will be exempt from late penalties. Requests for extensions sent by email will not be entertained.
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Plagiarism
Simply: don't even think about it. Students are referred to Brock University's official policy on plagiarism, and they are further advised that the instructor has an especially low view of such behaviour. Citations should conform to guidelines set out in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th ed.).
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Medical
Emergencies
All students should familiarize themselves
with Brock’s Medical Exemption policy and follow its procedures if necessary (see http://www.brocku.ca/healthservices/exemption.php).
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Schedule |
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| September 15 |
course introduction
Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society" (from Prisms) |
| September 22 |
State of the Art
Plato, from Republic Books II, III, and X (45-60, 64-77)
Shelley, from A Defence of Poetry (595-613)
Eagleton, from Literary Theory: An Introduction (2140-46)
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| September 29 |
Authorship and Authority
Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" (1232-46)
Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1322-26)
Foucault, "What is an Author?" (1475-90)
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| October 6 |
The Role of the Reader
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader" (1524-32)
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| October 13 |
Discursive Structures (I)
Hegel, from Phenomenology of Spirit (541-47)
Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics (850-66)
Jakobson, from Linguistics and Poetics (1144-52)
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| October 20 |
History and Historicism
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1051-71)
Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" (1423-37)
Greenblatt, from Resonance and Wonder (2150-61)
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| October 27 |
The Textual Condition
McGann, The Textual Condition
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| November 3 |
The Unconscious
Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams (814-24) and from The "Uncanny" (824-41)
Lacan, from The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious (1169-81) and "The Signification of the Phallus" (1181-89)
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| November 10 |
Sexing the Text
De Beauvoir, from The Second Sex (1265-73)
Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1942-59)
Butler, from Gender Trouble (2540-53)
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| November 17 |
Discursive Structures (II)
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (2071-81)
Derrida, from Dissemination (1697-1734)
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| November 24 |
Nation, Empire, and Alterity
Said, from Orientalism (1866-88)
Anderson, from Imagined Communities (1916-23)
Spivak, from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2114-26)
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| December 1 |
The Next Page
Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (online)
Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" (2282-302)
Bhaba, "The Commitment to Theory" (2353-72)
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Assignments
- Seminar presentations. Each student is expected (a) to lead a discussion of one of the theoretical texts in the course and (b) to present a reading of one or at most two of Emily Dickinson's poems (preferably not ones previously discussed). Both should take roughly 20 minutes (this estimate ought not to be long overshot) and the purpose of both is to stimulate fruitful discussion. These two presentations should not coincide on the same day of class.
The object of the first is not merely to summarize the ideas and views expressed in a given reading but to probe the implications of those ideas and views. To this end, students may feel free to contextualize given theories and/or compare them with others.
The Dickinson reading requires students to demonstrate how a given theory or theorist can contribute to an interpretation. Each student must inform the class the week before his or her Dickinson reading which poem(s) he or she will be discussing (it is understood that the theoretical material assigned for the day of the Dickinson reading is to be used in that reading).
- Response paper. Each student will submit one written response (roughly 4-6 pages, double-spaced) to another student's Dickinson reading. The style and approach are for the student to choose ?essay, epistolary, imaginary dialogue? though specific attention to the texts at issue and proper methods of citation are required. The response paper is due in class the week following the relevant Dickinson reading.
- Final essay. A major paper, roughly 18-20 pages, which significantly employs three of the theorists studied this term and takes up one of the following tasks:
(a) Consider the textual history of one of Dickinson's poems by comparing different printings of a single poem.
(b) Discuss the relation between Dickinson's poetry (you may wish to focus on a few specific poems, or even a single one) and one of the following:
- Michael Bedard, Emily (2007)
- Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters (1997)
- J. Willis Buckingham, Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (1989)
- Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Facsicles (1993)
- Jerome Charyn, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010)
- Jorie Graham, Swarm (2000)
- Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2010)
- Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Reading the Facsicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities (2003)
- Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985)
- Virginia Jackson, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)
- Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louis Hart, eds., Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998)
The Dickinson poem(s) in focus in your essay cannot be the same one(s) discussed in your seminar presentation. Prior discussion with the instructor about proposed directions for the paper is recommended. Due December 14.
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Further Reading
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd ed.)
Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (2nd ed.)
Irena R. Makaryk, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory
Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Prince Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (rev. ed.)
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
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