Course Outline

Course Title: Literary Theory and Practice

Course Code: ENG-609

Credit Hours: 3(3-0)

Course Contents

1. Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory

✔ Defining Literary Criticism, Theory, and Literature
✔ What is a text?
✔ Who is a critic, and what is literary criticism?
✔ What is literary theory?
✔ How to read and interpret texts
✔ The purpose of literary theory
✔ How to extract multiple, but logical, meanings from a single text

2. Evolution of Literary Theory and Criticism

✔ Classical Criticism (Plato to Plotinus)
✔ Medieval and Renaissance Criticism (Dante Alighieri to Boccaccio, Sidney to Henry James)
✔ Modern Literary Criticism (Bakhtin, Russian Formalism, New Criticism)

3. Russian Formalism and New Criticism

✔ Development and Key Terms
✔ The application of Russian Formalism on a literary text
✔ Differences between Russian Formalism and New Criticism
✔ Major tenets and methods
✔ Critiques of Russian Formalism and New Criticism

4. Reader-Oriented Criticism

✔ Development
✔ Major ideas and methods (Step-by-step analysis)
✔ Critiques of Reader-Oriented Criticism

5. Structuralism

✔ Understanding Modernity and Modernism
✔ The Development of Structuralism
✔ Key Concepts:

• Structure of language (langue and parole)
• Saussure’s definition of a word
• Narratology and its types
• Binary opposition
• Narrative functions (as explained by Propp, Campbell, etc.)
  ✔ Structuralist methodologies and applications on literary texts
  ✔ Critiques of Structuralism

6. Deconstruction

✔ Transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
✔ Development of Deconstruction
✔ Key Assumptions:

• Transcendental signified
• Logocentrism
• Opening up binary oppositions
• Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Phonocentrism, Metaphysics of Presence, Arché Writing, Supplementation, Différance)
  ✔ Application of Deconstructive Theory on Literary Texts
  ✔ Developments in Deconstructive Theory (Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome)
  ✔ Critiques of Deconstruction

7. Psychoanalytic Criticism

✔ Development of Psychoanalytic Criticism
✔ Key Theorists & Concepts:

• Sigmund Freud (Id, Ego, Superego, Oedipus and Electra complexes, pleasure principle)
• Northrop Frye (Archetypal Criticism)
• Jacques Lacan (Imaginary Order, Mirror Stage, Ideal-I, Symbolic Order, the Real Order, objet petit a)
  ✔ Psychoanalytic methodologies and their application on texts

8. Feminist Literary Theory

✔ Historical development of Feminism
✔ First, Second, and Third Waves:

• Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Judith Butler
  ✔ French Feminism:
• Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous
  ✔ Third World Feminism & Postcolonial Feminism:
• Gayatri Spivak, Sara Suleri, Chandra Talpade Mohanty
  ✔ Relationship with contemporary socio-political issues

9. Marxist Literary Theory

✔ Development of Marxist Theory
✔ Key Theorists:

• Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, George Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton
  ✔ Key Concepts:
• Dialectical materialism
• Base and superstructure
• Interpellation
• False consciousness
• Proletariat and class struggle
• Hegemony and Ideological State Apparatus
• Political unconscious

10. New Historicism and Cultural Poetics

✔ Differences between Old Historicism and New Historicism
✔ Development of New Historicism
✔ Key Theorists:

• Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz
  ✔ Major Concepts:
• Discourse
• Poetics of culture
• Inter-discursivity
• Irruption

11. Postcolonialism

✔ Historical Development of Colonialism and Postcolonialism
✔ Key Theorists:

• Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Aijaz Ahmad, Sarah Ahmed, Talal Asad
  ✔ Key Concepts & Binary Oppositions:
• Hegemony, Center/Periphery, Us/Other, Marginalization
• Third Space, Liminality, Hybridity, Assimilation
• Code-switching and code-mixing
  ✔ Postcolonial theory and the diasporic experience
  ✔ Critiques of Postcolonialism

12. Ecocriticism

✔ Relationship between literature and the environment
✔ Development and key concerns of Ecocriticism

Recommended Books

• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (NY: Routledge, 1995).
• Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (NY: Routledge, 1998).
• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (Trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, NY: Random House, 2009).
• Bloom, Harold et al. Deconstruction and Criticism (NY: The Continuum Publishing Company, 2004).
• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994).
• Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (NY, 1998).
• Brooks, Cleanth. Understanding Fiction (New Jersey: Pearson, 1998).
• Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (NY: Harcourt, 1956).
• Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
• Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Writing and Différance (Trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
• Eagleton, Mary, Ed. A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
• Eagleton, Terry. Making Meanings with Texts: Selected Essays (NY: Reed-Elsevier, 2005).
• Hamilton, Paul. Historicism (NY: Routledge, 1996).
• Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration (NY: Noble, 1996).
• Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman, Eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994).