ENG 4043.002 Fall 2023

This course will approach contemporary developments in theory through a thematic focus on individualism: its complexities, constructions, and contradictions. We may assume that the human individual is the fundamental unit of action, meaning, and power. After all, individual being is certainly how we usually experience our own lives and choices. In the contemporary moment, however, critical theory has complicated this picture in various ways—exploring, for instance, how individuals are shaped by institutions and ideologies; how subjectivity and consciousness are messier than we think; how human individuals exist in permeable, symbiotic relation to nonhuman others; and how our very conception of “the individual” is historically and culturally conditioned, not inevitable or universal. In this course, we will read foundational twentieth-century critical theorists including Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Sylvia Wynter, trace how their investigations of individualism continue to shape twenty-first century literary and cultural criticism, and turn to contemporary fiction to understand how literary writers have taken up linked questions and concerns. By the end of the semester, students will have developed a keener appreciation for how theory speaks to their lives—and, conversely, how complex theoretical debates unfold in literary and other popular spaces.