Wagner College, Fall 2002
Dr. Pranav Jani Office Hours: MW 3-4:30, or by appointment
Parker Hall 302 http://www.wagner.edu/faculty/users/pjani
pjani@wagner.edu http://webboard.wagner.edu/~pjani
(718) 390-3362
Paired with English 425: Senior Seminar, “White Trash” (Dr. Peter Sharpe)
Course Description:
For English majors,
graduation is often represented as a confrontation with “the real world,” a
space outside the campus in which poetry, art, and intellectual thought itself
are regarded as having no practical value. Sure you know how to drag an
interpretation out of a short story, but what can you do?
This class will suggest something different, that the critical methods learned in English classes offer tremendous possibilities for understanding personal and social experience that go far beyond literary texts. We will "put theory to work" in two different ways: by learning about the different ways in which theorists have confronted “the real” in analyzing literature and culture, and then applying those methods to analyze your own positions as humanities majors and job-seekers in a tumultuous time of war and recession. In the process, we will discover not only that we already inhabit "the real world," but that our skills allow us to expose the myths and fictions of that world. Readings will include basic texts from formalist, Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theory.
Required Texts
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
Vincent Leitch, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Assignments and Grading
Journal: 10%
Presentation: 10%
Participation: 15%
Paper #1 (1,000 words) 25%
Paper #2 (2,000 words) 40%
Journal
To fulfill RFT requirements,
you will be asked to make weekly entries in an online, public journal on the
webboard. Each entry – a few paragraphs
long – should attempt to analyze your internship/research/writing experience in
terms of the concepts learned in class, whether theoretical or literary. Please make your entry before 6 am every
Monday morning through the semester; late entries will not be accepted.
Presentation
Each student is required to do an oral presentation on the assigned theoretical readings. After confirming that you have a good grasp of what the text is saying, try to make an argument during your presentation, outlining your own critical reading of the article.
Class Participation and Attendance
Try to be actively present in class by being prepared to participate in class discussions, critique the readings, and express opinions. Not only is discussion important to your grade, but sharing your ideas in class will help refining your ideas in your papers.
More than three absences—excused or unexcused—will affect your grade. It is your responsibility to communicate with me about missed class time.
Timely Submission of Work
Out of fairness to each student, I will only give full credit to papers and assignments turned in by the due date. This may require planning ahead on your part, especially if you have multiple papers due on the same day. Late papers will be knocked down one-third of a grade for each class that they are late. On the other hand, please do not hesitate to speak with me about a due date in case of emergency.
M 8/26 What is the “Real World”?
W 8/28 “Introduction” (1-28)
Extra Reading: Terry Eagleton, “What is Literature?”
M 9/2 NO CLASS—Labor Day
W 9/4 Eagleton, “The Rise of English” (2243-49)
Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, “Introduction” to White Trash: Race and Class in America
M 9/9 Percy Bysshe Shelly, from A
Defence of Poetry (Norton 699-717)
W 9/11 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The Communist Manifesto (769-73)
Marx, from Capital, Volume I (776-87)
Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch (787-88)
M 9/16 Sigmund Frued, from The Interpretation of Dreams (919-29)
Freud, “Fetishism” (952-56)
W 9/18 Matthew Arnold, from Culture and
Anarchy (825-32)
M 9/23 William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1374-87)
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The
Affective Fallacy” (1387-1403)
W 9/25 Cleanth Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn (1353-65)
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1092-98)
Leon Trotsky, from Literature and Revolution (1005-17)
M 9/30 Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics (963-77)
Eagleton, “Structuralism and Semiotics”
W 10/2 Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes
Tropiques (1419-27)
Roland Barthes, from Mythologies (1461-65)
Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1465-70)
M 10/7 Jaques Derrida, from Of Grammatology (1822-30)
Jean Baudrilliard, from The Precession of Simulacra (1732-41)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern” (1612-15)
W 10/9 Eagleton, “Post-structuralism”
bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” (2478-84)
M 10/14 NO CLASS—Colonizers’ Day
T 10/15 Monday Classes
Jaques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (1285)
Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus” (1302)
W 10/16 Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble (2488-2501)
Eagleton, “Psychoanalysis”
M 10/21 Michael Foucault, from Discipline and Punish (1636-47)
Foucault, from The
History of Sexuality (1648-66)
W 10/23 Dick Hebdige, from Subculture: The Meaning of Style (2448-57)
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (2181-92)
M 10/28 NO CLASS—Fall Break
W 10/30 Helen Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
(2039-56)
Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman” (2014-21)
M 11/4 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Madwoman in the Attic” (2023-35)
W 11/6 Eve K. Sedgwick, from Epistemology of
the Closet (2438-45)
Extra Reading: Adrienne Rich, from Compulsory Heterosexuality (1762-80)
M 11/11 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1313-17)
Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1159-62)
Eagleton, “Political Criticism”
W 11/13 Henry Louis Gates. Jr. “Talking Black” (2424-2432)
Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” (2302-15)
M 11/18 Edward Said, from Orientalism (1991-2012)
Gloria Anzaldua, from Borderlands/La
Frontera (2211-23)
W 11/20 Gayatri C. Spivak, from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2197-2208)
M 11/25 Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth (1578-87)
Ngugi, wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba. “On the Abolition of the English Department” (2092-97)
W 11/27 NO
CLASS—Thanksgiving Break
M 12/2 OPEN DATE