ENG 5079-Fall 2025-Kilgore

This course will introduce you to the issue of literary and cultural studies—its institutional history and contemporary situation, its changing protocols and problematics in a professional discipline called English, and, perhaps most of all, its auto-critique, its attempt to ground and unground its practices and purpose, to interrogate its own conditions of possibility and social function. As such, this will be less an “introduction to theory” and more an “introduction to the theory of theory.” We’ll read and discuss a selection of texts attempting to answer the question: what is literary and cultural studies anyway? Why and how do we do it? On the other hand, to make this course as useful as possible for your own work and to encourage collaborative learning, I’m also hoping to break the class up into small theory cells based on a field or topic of critical inquiry that matters to you and have you work on mini-assignments and projects that will help you gain an understanding of that field or topic’s scholarship in practice.