English 752 Summer 2004 - Literary Theory
for the Teacher and Scholarly Writer |
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The everyday life of the teacher and critic involves the practices of reading, writing, interpretation, and commentary. In that they constitute a routine, such practices may come to seem so natural that they become invisible to us. Critics of everyday life aim to alter the relationship to the everyday by rendering the familiar strange or defamiliarizing it. This course presumes one virtue of theory to be its capacity to invite a similar process of defamiliarization in readers, leading to renewed self-consciousness and new practices. Through close reading of critical texts associated with some of the main schools of critical theory (structuralism, marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, reception, identity), seminar participants engage in a very selective survey of essay-length critical texts. We gain familiarity with the fundamental practices of particular schools and, at the same time, seek to establish connections through the lenses of such recurring concepts as the unconscious, structure, culture, ideology, gender, and ethnicity. Students may expect to develop a facility at "trying on" and practicing within a handful of paradigms, rather than acquiring mastery of a single "method" or achieving an encyclopedic coverage. A few literary texts and perhaps a film will also be folded into the discussion. A list of assigned texts will be available in advance; please consult the webpage: www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood/courses.htm. Requirements will likely include active participation, preparation of discussion questions, two experiments (pedagogical micro-lesson, performative text), and one 10-15 page final research paper. If you have questions, please email sherwood@iup.edu.
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