Course module - Theory and Text
Code : ENGL10062 Credit rating: 20 Semester : 2
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Aims |
Objectives |
Assessment |
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Course Content |
Course Materials |
Tutors |
Timetable |
Teaching Methods |
Keywords
Aims
- To help students reflect on their position as culturally and historically situated readers;
- To challenge contemporary ‘common sense ‘ approaches to reading;
- To rigorously examine how thinkers from different historical periods have examined the problems of textuality, power and value;
- To help students learn how to examine, discuss, and defend a theoretical position;
- To examine the category of ‘the literary’;
- To encourage and facilitate reflection on the relevance of theory in relation to a large variety of texts and genres;
- To encourage students to reflect on habits of reading, and on how gender, ethnicity and sexuality play crucial roles in discussions of authorship and readership;
- To familiarise students with key critical notions which will help their criticism in future years.
Objectives (Learning Outcomes)
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of key theoretical issues such as: narration, an author’s intentionality, cultural value, habits of reading, mimesis, textual structures, interpretation and desire, the form/content opposition, critiques of ‘common sense’ and some basic concepts for the analysis of film;
- Show an ability to closely analyse and interpret theoretical interventions;
- Demonstrate an ability to develop an independent critical position in relation to these;
- Evidence an ability to enter literary and non literary texts into a dialogue with theoretical texts;
- Show an ability to rigorously argue and defend one’s own critical position through textual evidence;
- Evidence an awareness of the historicity of apparently self-evident notions (e.g. literature, mimesis, authorship, specific habits of reading, etc).
- Demonstrate an ability to write with a degree of self-reflectivity (i.e. reflect on their own critical language)
- Demonstrate an ability to see the connection between self-reflective thinking in relation to literary, cinematic and theoretical texts and our day-to-day critical practices;
- Show an ability to transfer the analytical and self-reflective skills acquired on this course to non-academic environments (e.g. job interviews, etc);
- Evidence an ability to discuss, with cogency and respect, one’s own position;
- Evidence an ability to appreciate the complexity and usefulness of intellectual debates;
- Show an ability to historicise and culturally situate an interpretation.
Assessment
One short close analysis of a passage from one of the primary texts in section 1 at the beginning of term to be repeated (on the same passage) at the end of term. The two readings to be posted on BB and compared and discussed in the last seminar session, 1,400 words (700 + 700) (20%); one 2,000-word essay to be submitted before Easter (30%); one 2,500-word essay to be submitted during the exam period (50%).
Information
THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE AS FREE-CHOICE.
Course Content
Week 1
Introductory lecture: Common sense
Dr Daniela Caselli
Key questions:
• Theory and common sense
• ‘We’ as a culturally, ideologically and historically situated notion
• Assumptions about literature as expression and self-expression
• The category of ‘the literary’ as a historical category
• Possible definitions of literary, critical, and cultural theory
• Why do we need theory?
• Thinking of theory not as a form of critical mastery but as a way to reflect on our role as readers.
• How can we begin to think of literature and theory together?
Key texts:
• Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, second edition, 2002 [1980]). Students will be asked to buy and read this text before the beginning of term.
Section 1
Author
Primary texts (lectures will make reference to these throughout the section):
• William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. With an Introduction and Notes by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1984]), pp. 131-135.
• Jorge Louis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in Labyrinths, eds Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Preface by André Maurois (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 62-71.
Pdfs of these texts will be available on Blackboard
Week 2
What Matter Who’s Speaking?
Dr Daniela Caselli
Key questions:
• Differences between author, narrator, lyrical I (both in prose and poetry, but examples from epistolary literature, plays, cinema and autobiographies could be used to investigate the relation further). Essential here, in my view, to have medieval and early modern examples.
• Questions of reliability and fictionality.
• Questions of power and control.
Key texts:
• Excerpts from Aristotle and/or Sidney (see below) and Wordsworth and Borges (see above)
Week 3
What is an Author?
Dr Kaye Mitchell
Key questions:
• The notion of the author as a historical formation (examples of pre-modern texts, biblical exegesis, almanacs, miscellanea, films, letters, diaries)
• Ideas of power, authorship and authority
• Authorship and authority in relation to gender, sexuality and ethnicity (for instance, early modern women writers; slave narratives; writings on sexology)
• The theoretical move from ‘what does the author mean?’ to ‘what ideas of authority does the text present’?
• From the ‘death of the author’ to the ‘author function’.
Key texts:
• Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–149.
• Michel Foucault, ‘What Is An Author?’(1969), The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101-120.
Pdfs of these texts will be available on Blackboard
Week 4
Must We mean What We Say?
Dr Kaye Mitchell
Key questions:
• The intentional fallacy
• Textuality and intentionality
• Non-literary texts and intentionality (drama, TV, film)
• Political implications of rethinking intentionality
Key texts:
• W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review, 54:3 (1946), 468–488.
A pdf of this text will be available on Blackboard
The second hour of this two-hour lecture will be devoted to a debate between Iain Bailey, Kaye Mitchell and Patricia Duncker on the issues of authority and intentionality covered in this first section.
Section 2
Text
Primary texts:
• Aristotle’s Poetics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996).
• Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defense of Poesy), revised edition, by R. W. Maslen and Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
Students will be asked to buy and read these texts before class.
Week 5
The Text and the Real: Literature as Imitation?
Dr Anke Bernau
Key questions:
• The category of the literary (relation between classical rhetoric, Christian exegesis and literature as an institution)
• How do ideas of imitation in literature change throughout history?
• What is poetry good for?
• Imitation and imagination.
• Originality and repetition.
• Issues of referentiality.
• Beyond mimesis.
Key texts:
• Eric Auerbach, chapter 1, ‘Odysseus’ Scar’ in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 50th anniversary edition, 2003)
A pdf of this text will be available on Blackboard
Week 6
Beauty versus Truth
Dr Anke Bernau
Key questions:
• What is poetry good for?
• The relationship between ethics and aesthetics in literature.
• Where does a text begin and end?
• How to think of the text as a structure and why.
• How to think of narrative logic? Fabula and szujet, narrative development.
Key texts:
• As in week 5
Week 7
Surfaces and Depths
Dr Robert Spencer
Key questions:
• The form/content opposition.
• The idea of text as linear development and that of text as surface and depth. Implications of both the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ models.
• Issues of ‘reading for the plot’ in relation to the form/content contentious divide.
• Problems with thinking of a text as an organic whole.
• Issues of taxonomy and hierarchy of meaning.
Key texts:
• Peter Brooks, ‘Reading for the Plot’ in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 3¬-36.
A pdf of this text will be available on Blackboard
The second hour of this two-hour lecture will be devoted to a debate between Anke Bernau, Robert Spencer and Michael Sanders on the issues of mimesis, truth and beauty covered in this first section.
Section 3
Reader
Primary texts:
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 [1818])
• Pretty Woman. Directed by Gerry Marshall, with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts (1990)
Students will be asked to buy these texts and read them before class
Week 8
What is a Reader?
Dr Iain Bailey
Key questions:
• Ideal and implied reader (or spectator)
• How does a text construct its readers?
• Addressees in different genres (also non literary)
• Reading and Desire
Key texts:
• Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1976], pp. 3–19
A pdf of this text will be available on Blackboard
Week 9
Reading and Power
Dr Iain Bailey
Key questions:
• Reading and questions of gender, ethnicity, sexuality (this could be thought both in terms of how gender / ethnicity / sexuality / intersection of the above produce a reader and how the author’s gender / ethnicity / sexuality / intersection of the above inflects the reception of a text (linking it back to the earlier discussion of authority)
• Historical differences in reading practices
• Reading communities
• The social production of literature
• Problems of ethics and interpretation
Key texts:
• JH Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
A pdf of this text will be available on Blackboard
Week 10
Making Meaning
Dr Robert Spencer
Key questions:
• Instability of meaning
• Habits of reading
• Reading, ideology and desire.
• Historical shifts in attribution of cultural value to genres and modes
• Common sense approaches to texts (in itself a historically variable notion)
• Back to critique of mimesis, authorial intentionality and hidden truths.
Key Texts:
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2000 [1957])
Students will be asked to buy this text and read it before class.
The second hour of this two-hour lecture will be devoted to a debate between David Alderson, Robert Spencer and Michael Sanders on the issues of readership, cultural value, habit and desire covered in this first section.
Week 11
Conclusion and revision
Dr Daniela Caselli
Course Materials
Tutor(s)
Caselli, Dr Daniela
Timetable
PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE FOR 2013-2014
Lecture: Monday, 10.00-12.00
Seminars: T B A
Teaching Methods
One 2-hour lecture per week, plus one 1-hour seminar per week.
Preliminary reading
PrimaryTexts:
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’
Jorge Louis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’,
Aristotle’s Poetics
Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Gerry Marshall (Dir.), Pretty Woman
Selected Theoretical Texts:
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, second edition, 2002 [1980]).
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142-49.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is An Author?’(1969), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101-20.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1976], pp. 3-19
W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review, 54:3 (1946), 468-88.
Additional Bibliography:
Anthologies and Reference Books
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, (London: Longman, 2009, fourth edition).
Vincent Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010).
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, revised second edition)
Additional Critical Texts
Theodor Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007).
Roland Barthes and Lionel Duisit, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives, (Winter, 1975), pp. 237-272.
Sean Burke, Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995).
Ferdinand De Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistic’, eds Charles Bally and Albert Secheaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, translated and annotated by Roy Harris (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986 [1972]).
Lisa Duggan, ‘The Trials of Alice Mitchell. Sensationalism, Sexology and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America’, Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader edited by J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 73-87.
Shoshana Felman, What Does A Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1966]).
Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman, Acts of Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Cornell UP, 1990).
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), 6¬¬–18.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873), in Rivkin and Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 358–361.
Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Nebraska University Press, 2003, new edition).
John Ruskin ‘Of King’s Treasuries’, in Sesame and Lilies (London: Gorge Allen, 1893), complete edition.
Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, in Theory of Prose, introduction by Gerald L. Bruns, Trans Benjamin Shers (Normal, ILL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), pp. 1-14.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (London: Virago, 1999 [1972]).
Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 243–261.
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Reading as Construction’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, The Reader in the Tex: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton UP, 1980).
Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 1980).