- Spring 2020
Syllabus Description:
English 304—Spring 2019
Course Description
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a revolution in literary criticism that overturned traditional ideas about what literature is, and about how literary criticism should be done. We will begin this course with a brief survey of the traditional views. The purpose of this survey is to introduce you to the basic concepts and terminology of literary criticism. We will then turn to the new views that slowly emerged in the post-WW II period, beginning with the so-called “formalism” of the so-called “New Critics,” represented here by Cleanth Brooks, continuing with structuralism (represented here by Barthes) and the various forms of “suspicious” or “demystifying” criticism that followed. We will focus especially on the question of the nature of the creative process by which poets make poems. Do poems come from the heart, from “inspired” feeling—as in a traditional "Romantic" view that remains very common today—or are they a product of artisanal labor and know-know (as in techne theory), or are they produced by a “context” that uses the poet as a vehicle of impersonal social-historical forces (as in "structuralism" and various forms of "contextual" criticism)?
Texts:
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice
All other readings in your course packet from Ram’s Copy Center on the Ave (4144 University Way)
Readings:
Traditional views:
Poetry as imitation of nature: Aristotle, selections from Poetics
Poetry as “expression” of feeling (Romanticism): Wordsworth, selections from Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
Fiction as both imitation and expression (“expressive realism”): Henry James, selections from “The Art of Fiction.”
A modern Romantic: Heaney, “Feeling into Words”
Formalism, structuralism, and contextualism:
Staten, “An Anti-Romantic View: Paul Valéry”
Cleanth Brooks, selections from “The Heresy of Paraphrase” and “The Language of Paradox”
Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Catherine Belsey, Literary Theory, Chs. 1 and 2
Volosinov, selections from “Verbal Interaction,” from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When you See One
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”