ENG 3010, Section 2403
Modern Criticism:
Professor Phillip Wegner
Tuesday 8-9 (3-4:55 p.m.); Thursday 9 (4:05-4:55
p.m.)
Office:
Turlington 4335
Office Hours: Tuesday, 5-6 p.m., Thursday, 2-3 p.m.;
and by appointment
Phone: 392-6650. ex. 261 (office); 392-0777 (dept.)
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm
This course is
designed to introduce you to some of the most important thinkers, movements,
issues, debates, and practices in twentieth-century literary and cultural
theory. Our goal in studying these
works is to become better critical readers, by making our selves more sensitive
to the variety of ways in which literary and cultural texts can be said to
³mean² anything. Our readings will
be clustered into three five-week units, each focusing on set of essays
assembled under the broader rubrics of Form, Subject, and Context. In each unit, we will explore a
different locus for the production of literary and culture meaning:
respectively, the formal
structures of the text itself; the location in the world of the author or
audience; and finally the larger historical, social, and cultural contexts in
which the work appears. Thus, as
we move through the readings we will gradually widen our horizons of inquiry;
although in the end, I will suggest that a fuller understanding of all kinds of
texts can be gained through a recognition of the interrelationship, and indeed
the inseparability, of all three perspectives. Along, the way students will become acquainted with such
central movements as New Criticism, Russian Formalism, structuralism,
semiotics, deconstruction, reader response criticism, psychoanalysis, feminism,
gender studies, queer theory, post-colonial theory, Marxist criticism, New
Historicism, and cultural materialism.
Texts
Lee Lemon and
Marion Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays
Jacques Derrida,
Limited Inc.
Course packs
These texts are
all available at Goerings Book Store Campus Location (1717 NW 1st Avenue, next
door to Bageland; 377-3703).
Requirements,
Grading, and Related Matters
1) Although this course is designed as an introduction to the diverse methodologies and
practices of twentieth-century literary theory, and hence does not presuppose
any previous experience in these areas, there are still some basic requirements
for participation in this course.
This is an upper-division
English major course, and thus I assume you have completed lower division
composition and
literature courses. Additionally,
it would be very useful if you have already completed some upper-division
English major courses. During the
semester, you will be asked to demonstrate, in both your oral and written contributions to the class,
proficiency in the kinds of critical and analytical skills expected of advanced
literary studies majors. The
readings are drawn from a range of different intellectual and national
traditions, they are extensive, and they are sometimes quite difficult. You will be expected to keep up with the
readings, and to respond to them in a variety of written forms. Finally, I require on the part of each
and every student an open-mind and a willingness to carefully and seriously
engage with the ideas we will be discussing, even (and perhaps especially) when
these challenge the common sense
assumptions and expectations that we bring to the reading of literature and
culture. If you have any questions
about whether this course is right for you, please come and speak with me soon.
2) Readings should be completed before
the first class meeting in which they are to be discussed. This means you should be reading
continuously, getting well ahead of our discussions‹your reading journals will
prove invaluable in this regard (see number 3 below). Moreover, I do expect lively participation on everyone's
part in the class discussion. If conversation
lags, you can expect occasional quizzes or other short writing assignments.
3) During the course of the semester, we
will be reading widely and extensively in what I am confident will be for you
new and exciting materials. Again
however, this very unfamiliarity may cause some difficulties from time to
time. Hence, in order to help you
better grasp the major issues and themes at play in these essays, to formulate
your own questions, and to facilitate the development of class discussion, each
of you will be expected to keep a written, loose leaf journal of
responses to the essays. While
these journals are meant to be informal and speculative in nature, they must
still demonstrate an engaged
critical attention to the readings: reductive statements of taste or opinion,
or comments on only the first paragraph of the essay, will not be
acceptable. I will ask you
to do a number of specific things in these journals. First, you will need to summarize, in your own words and to
the degree that you grasp it, the major argument of the essay as a whole: what
is the fundamental problematic
in which it is engaged? What are
the axioms offered to
us? Second, you will need to note
any specific passages or argumentative threads that cause you difficulty, and
pose specific questions that you will be prepared to ask in class. Beyond these requirements, you may also
want to do a number of other things, such as compare and contrast the essay¹s
ideas with those advanced in earlier readings; make connections to other things
you are reading elsewhere; or (and I especially want to encourage you to try
out this last option), experiment with the ideas and methods offered in these
essays by briefly applying them to a reading of literary works you are studying
in other courses. I will be
collecting these entries approximately every other week, checking on them
throughout the semester, and asking you to read from them in class, so be
sure to have them with you at every course meeting (they will also aid you
in the class discussions). Missed
journal submission will result in a lowered final course grade.
4) The formal written dimension of the
course will be comprised of three papers of varying lengths (between 5-7
and 7-10 pages), all double-spaced, with one-inch margins, a reasonable
12-point or smaller font, and a consistent bibliographic format. Each paper will focus on the course
readings and will address a set of questions, issues, and themes developed in
our discussion of each of the three units. Approximately two weeks before each
paper is due, I will provide you with a series of questions that will help
focus your discussion, and you will be required to develop each of your papers
in response to them. Papers are
due on the dates noted below; late papers will receive lowered grades unless
other arrangements have been made in advance with me.
5) As everything above should suggest,
attendance and participation in class discussion are an indispensable part of
the work we are going to do here.
To this end, you will sign a class attendance roster circulated at the
beginning of each meeting. You will
be allowed three unexcused absences, totaling no more than four class hours,
throughout the semester. Any
additional non-emergency, non-medical absence not cleared in advance by
me will result in a lowering of the final course grade. To state the matter simply and
directly, if you miss an excessive number of classes, you will have been
considered not to have completed the requirements of the course, and
hence will not receive a passing grade. Moreover, regular late arrivals (or early departures) will
be counted as absences.
6) No final or midterm
examinations.
7) Grades will be based on the
conscientious completion of all of the above requirements. Failure to complete any of the
requirements‹including excessive absences or missed journal entries‹will result
in a failure of the course.
8) Finally, communication is crucial to
everything we are going to do in the next four months. Thus, if you are unsure about any of
the course requirements, or run into any kind of difficulty, academic or
otherwise, as the semester progresses, please come and speak with me as soon as
possible. I will try to be as accommodating as possible, but I cannot help you
if you do not let me know what is going on. Also if you have any general questions, or just feel like
continuing the discussion begun in class, I encourage you to drop by during my
scheduled office hours or to make an appointment to see me.
A
Brief Note on Academic Honesty
Plagiarism in
any form‹including but not limited to directly quoting, paraphrasing, or
summarizing from external sources without proper citations, as well as
presenting as your own work papers written by someone else (for example a paper
written by a friend; a purchased or retyped paper; or one taken from a file,
electronic or otherwise)‹is a direct violation of the university Academic
Honesty Code. You are required to
review this code and the Academic Honesty Guidelines, especially the discussion
of plagiarism, found in the Undergraduate Catalogue. Plagiarism or any other form of academic dishonesty will
result in an automatic failure of the assignment, a mandatory rewriting of the
assignment, and a lowering by two letter grades of your final course
grade (a B would become a D); a second attempt will result in an automatic
failure of the course and a filing of a report in your academic file. If you have any questions, or even the slightest doubt, about what constitutes plagiarism
or academic dishonesty, I beseech you to come and speak with me before you turn in the paper.
Tentative
Schedule
Part I: Form (August 23-September 30)
New Criticism
Essays by W. K.
Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley and Cleanth Brooks (in course pack)
Russian
Formalism
Essays by Victor
Shlovsky and Boris Eichenbaum (in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays).
Structuralism
and Semiotics
Essays by Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Tzvetan
Todorov, Louis Marin, Julia
Kristeva, and Paul de Man (in course pack)
Interventions
Essays by V. N.
Volosinov (Mikhail Bahktin?) (in course pack);
Jacques Derrida,
Limited Inc.
**
Paper #1 Due October 5
Part II: Subject (October 5-November 4)
Writerly
Traditions
Essay by T. S.
Eliot (in course pack)
Reader
Response Criticism and Interpretive Communities
Essays by
Stanley Fish and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (in course pack)
Feminist and
Gender Theory
Essays by Elaine
Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy K. Miller, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, and Judith Butler (in course pack)
Psychoanalysis
Essays by
Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Laura Mulvey, and Slavoj Zizek (in course pack)
African-American
Literary Theory
Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. Barbara Smith, and Hortense Spillers (in course pack)
Interventions
Essays by Michel
Foucault and Edward Said (in course pack)
NO CLASS October
7
**
Paper #2 Due November 11
Part III: Context (November 9-December 7)
Marxist and
Materialist Criticism
Essays by Terry Eagleton,
Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, and Michael McKeon (in course pack)
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak and Rey Chow (in course pack)
Essays by
Kenneth Burke, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Janice Radway (in course pack)
New
Historicism
Essays by
Clifford Geertz and Stephen Greenblatt (in course pack)
NO CLASS
November 18
NO
CLASS November 25 (Thanksgiving)
**
Final Paper
Due: Friday, December 10