WEEK 1 (Aug 31-Sep 4): Introduction: The Canon and Its Discontents

• Readings:
  • Trevor Ross, "The Emergence of 'Literature'," (online)
  • Barbara Hernstein Smith. "Contingencies of Value," (anthol, 1551-74)
  • John Guillory, from Cultural Capital, (anthol, 1588-1608)
  • Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," (anthol, 689-96)

LABOR DAY HOLIDAY: Sep 7

WEEKS 2 and 3 (Sep 9-18): Classicism

• Readings:
  • Plato, from Republic and Ion, (anthol, 17-37)
  • Aristotle, from Poetics, (anthol, 38-64)
  • Longinus, On the Sublime, (anthol, 79-107)

WEEK 4 (Sep 21-25): Neoclassicism and the Apologists for Poetry

• Readings:
  • Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," (anthol, 206-217)
  • Samuel Johnson, Rambler #4, Rasselas, ch. 10 and from Preface to Shakespeare, (anthol, 318-38)
  • Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, (anthol, 131-59)
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, (anthol, 337-56)

WEEK 5 (Sep 28-Oct 2): Tradition: The Romantic Revisions

• Readings:
  • Friedrich Von Schiller, from On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, (anthol, 294-299)
  • William Wordsworth, "Preface," Lyrical Ballads, (anthol, 300-14)
  • Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and from The Study of Poetry, (anthol, 394-416)

WEEK 6 (Oct 5-9): Tradition: The Modern Apologists

• Readings:
  • T.S.Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," (anthol, 495- 503)
  • F. R. Leavis, from The Great Tradition, (anthol, 599-607)
  • Lionel Trilling, "The Meaning of Literary Ideas," (anthol, 608-620)
  • Northrop Frye, "The Archetypes of Literature," (anthol, 641-651)
  • Harold Bloom, "A Meditation Upon Priority," (anthol, 1027-31)

WEEK 7 (Oct 12-16): Formalism and New Historicism: The Absence of History

• Readings:
  • W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," (anthol, 748-56)
  • Cleanth Brooks, "Irony as a Principle of Structure," (anthol, 757-64)
  • Michel Foucault, "Las Meninas," (anthol, 1222-30)
  • Pierre Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," (anthol, 1231-52)

MID-TERM RECESS: OCT 19 & 20

WEEKS 8, 9 and 10 (Oct 21- Nov 6): Modernism and Postmodernism on Self-Expression

• Readings:
  • Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment, (anthol, 253-280)
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius and from Biographia Literaria, (anthol, 315-332)
  • Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," (anthol, 448-68)
  • Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Daydreaming and The Theme of the Three Caskets, (anthol, 481-94)
  • Martin Heidegger, Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry, (anthol, 560-70)
  • Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," (anthol, 877-88)
  • Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Laetter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud, (anthol, 1044-64)
  • Jane Gallop, from Reading Freud, (anthol, 1065-74)
  • Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and the Polis, (anthol, 1075-86)

WEEKS 11 and 12 (Nov 9 - 20): Culture and Politics

• Readings:
  • Christine de Pisan, from Querelle de la Rose, (anthol, 123-30)
  • Karl Marx, Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions and On Greek Art, (anthol, 385-93)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, (anthol, 417-33)
  • Claude Levi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth, (anthol, 835-43)
  • Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious, (anthol, 1172-87)
  • Clifford Geertz, Deep Play: Notes an the Balinese Cockfight, (anthol, 1253-77)
  • Homi K. Bhabha, Locations of Culture, (anthol, 1331-44)

WEEK 13 (Nov 23 and 25): Critique From The Margins

• Readings:
  • Edward W. Said, from Orientalism, (anthol, 1278-91)
  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Writing,"Race," and the Difference It Makes, (anthol, 1575-87)
  • Deborah E. McDowell, "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," (anthol, 1420-30)
  • Judith Fetterley, "Introduction" to The Resisting Reader, (anthol 990-7)
  • Judith Butler, "Immitations and Gender Insubordination," (anthol, 1513-25)

THANKSGIVING RECESS (Nov 26 and 27)

WEEKS 14 and 15 (Nov 30 - Dec 9): Cultural Literacy

• Readings:
  • Horace, The Art of Poetry, (anthol, 65-78)
  • David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, (anthol, 239-52)
  • Jonathan Culler, Literary Competence, (anthol, 853-64)
  • Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, (anthol, 1453-65)

Revised: 7 September, 1998

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