301

Criticism

Professor Ming-Qian Ma

MWF     8:00 - 8:50

Reg. No. 234773

                or

MWF     10:00 - 10:50

Reg. No. 171006

Designed as a survey class, English 301 is intended to introduce students to literary criticism of the 20th Century, with an emphasis on the post-1960s period.  Chronological in approach, it will study the representative texts of various schools of criticism, focusing on the basic terms, concepts, and methodologies.  The goals of this criticism are (1) to learn and understand the principles and paradigms of each kind of criticism; (2) to become critically aware of not only the ramifications but also the limitations of literary theory; (3) to rethink and question such notions as “innocent reading” or “purely spontaneous response”; and (4) to learn a range of interpretative methods.

 

The primary texts for the course are:

 

¨ Literary Theory:  An Anthology, 2nd Edition.  Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004.  (ISBN:  1-4051-0696-4)

¨ Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Herman Melville, with a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. Signet Classic, 1998.  (ISBN:  0-451-52687-2)

(Supplementary reading materials in criticism will be distributed when needed.)

 

Class requirements include regular attendance, active participation in class discussions, quizzes, response papers to readings, and a 6-8 page term paper at the end of the course.

301

Criticism

Professor Steven Miller

TTh      3:30 - 4:50

Reg. No. 254608    

This course is a general introduction for English majors to the history of literary theory and criticism. It is important to stress theory and criticism in order to understand that literary criticism goes beyond the evaluation or interpretation of literary works. Before it does anything else, criticism seeks language adequate to the task of grasping the nature of a linguistic artifact. It is language about language. Throughout the semester, therefore, we will stress the way in which criticism has historically contended with the complex relationship between literature and philosophy, because philosophy has historically been assigned the task of confronting the nature of language. We will spend the first part of the semester discussing the major texts of ancient literary criticism (Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, and Quintillian) that continue to inform critical debates to the present day; we will examine the relationship, in the 18th and 19th Centuries between the theory of literature and the theory of art (Hume, Kant, Hegel); and we will go on from there to consider the concept of literature that emerges from the Marxist interrogation of culture and ideology as superstructural formations; and, in the final section of the course, we will discuss the turn, in literary criticism and philosophy, to new questions of the materiality of language that go beyond the philosophical concern for truth and beauty.