Spring 2006 Course Calendar
Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:00-12:15 in Grainger 101.
For each class, come prepared with a brief written summary of the critical readings to be discussed. (These will not be handed in, but you may be asked to read your summary in class.) You should also be prepared to cite--and discuss--one example from a literary work you have read that either supports or refutes the critic's claims.
| 17 January | Course introduction. |
| 19 January | Plato, Republic 10 (Richter 21-29). Come to class prepared to respond to Socrates's question: "must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators, who copy images of virtue and the other themes of their poetry, but have no contact with the truth?" (p. 24). What, according to Plato, is the relationship between literature and philosophy? What, precisely, is Plato's problem with imitation? Can you think of any arguments like this in modern culture? |
| 24 January | Aristotle, Poetics (Richter 42-64). |
| 26 January | Horace, Ars Poetica (Richter 68-78). |
| 31 January | Longinus, On the Sublime (Richter 81-107). |
| 2 February | Sidney, Apology for Poetry (Richter 134-159) and, in Astrophil and Stella, read sonnets 1, 2, 7, and 9. [You should be able to find these poems in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, or in the Sidney section of www.luminarium.org.] |
| 7 February | Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (Richter 224-238). |
| 9 February | Class Cancelled. |
| 14 February | Short paper #1 due. |
| 16 February | Kant, Critique of Judgment (Richter 257-280). |
| 21 February | Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Richter 302-314). |
| 23 February | Keats, "Negative Capability" (Richter 234-236). |
| 28 February | Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism," "The Study of Poetry" (Richter 397-416). |
| 2 March | T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (Richter 498-503). |
| 7 March | Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own (Richter 551-559). |
| 9 March | Short paper #2 due. |
| 14/16 March | Spring Break. |
| 21 March | New Criticism/Formalism: Empson, Epilogue to Seven Types of Ambiguity (Richter 736-748). |
| 23 March | Structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign," and Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (Richter 832-844). |
| 28 March | Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play" (Richter 878-888) and Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (Richter 890-899). |
| 30 March | Reader-Response Criticism: Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum" (Richter 977-990). |
| 4 April | Psychoanalytic Theory: Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud" (Richter 1045-1065). |
| 6 April | Marxist Criticism: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Richter 1106-1121). |
| 11 April | Abstract of conference paper due. |
| 13 April | Harold Bloom, "The School of Resentment" [pdf] |
| 18 April | Annotated bibliography due. Individual conferences. |
| 20 April | Individual conferences. |
| 22 April | Academic Conference: Paper Presentations. Note that this is a Saturday, and that you can expect to be occupied from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
| 25 April | Final exam and MFAT exam preparation. |
| 27 April | Final Exam. |
3 May |
Final exam period: 3:00-5:30. Conference paper due. The MFAT exam will be administered during the final exam period. IMPORTANT: The final exam will be held in Hiner 20 (computer lab). |