Summer 2008 Course Calendar
Deadlines for discussion submissions is midnight, Sundays through Thursdays. For each reading or critic, be prepared to do the following in the Discussion Area:
(1) Briefly summarize the critical readings. (Make sure you read the relevant editorial headnotes--they will help.) Please don't repeat information that someone has already summarized. There are plenty of things going on in all of these works--try to touch on as many key points as possible, and feel free to disagree (politely) with points that others have made in their comments.
(2) Compare to and constrast each critic or idea with the critical approaches we have discussed previously. (Be prepared to cite specifics, and be prepared to cite specific works of literature as you develop your argument.)
(3) Discuss one example of (or from) a literary work you have read that either supports or refutes the critic's claims. Please provide as much detail and anlysis as possible.
By midnight |
students should have read the assignments below, and submitted responses to questions about the readings posted in the Discussion Area of Blackboard.
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| 13 July | Course introduction. Go to the Introductions forum on Blackboard, introduce yourselves, and respond to some of the instructor's introductory questions. Tutorials for students who have never taken an online course are available here. |
| 14 July | Plato, Republic 10 (Richter 30-38); Aristotle, Poetics (Richter 59-81). |
| 15 July | Horace, Ars Poetica (Richter 84-94); Longinus, On the Sublime (Richter 97-108). |
| 16 July | Sidney, Apology for Poetry (Richter 135-159) 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.]; Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (Richter 216-230). |
| 17 July | Kant, Critique of Judgment (Richter 251-274). |
| 20 July | Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Richter 306-318); Keats, "Negative Capability" (Richter 331-333). |
| 21 July | Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism," "The Study of Poetry" (Richter 415-434); T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (Richter 537-541). |
| 22 July | Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own (Richter 599-610); New Criticism/Formalism: Cleanth Brooks (Richter 798-806) and Empson, excerpt from Seven Types of Ambiguity (in Blackboard under Texts and Documents). |
| 23 July | Structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign," and Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (Richter 842-851, 860-870); Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play" (Richter 915-926) and Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (Richter 904-914). |
| 24 July | Reader-Response Criticism: Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One " (Richter 1023-1030); Freudian Criticism/Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud (Richter 509-533). |
| 27 July | Marxist Criticism: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Richter 1233-1249); Harold Bloom, "The School of Resentment." (In Blackboard under Texts and Documents.) |
| 28 July | Work on paper--share ideas, problems, and drafts with each other in the Discussion Area of Blackboard. |
| 29 July | Work on paper--share ideas, problems, and drafts with each other in the Discussion Area of Blackboard. |
| 30 July | Work on paper--share ideas, problems, and drafts with each other in the Discussion Area of Blackboard. |
| 31 July | Work on paper. Contributions and responses in the discussion area today are optional. |
| 1 August | Final paper due at midnight. |