ENG 3014 Fall 2019 Tran

This course serves as an introduction to contemporary literary and cultural theory. We will take as our point of departure Avery Gordon’s assertion that “We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there.” This invitation to deeply contemplate the worlds we inhabit, to participate in rigorous social, material, and cultural critique of existing conditions of injustice to enable the perception of more equitable worlds, will animate our approach to the theoretical and literary readings we engage in this class. We will explore how theory allows us to read literature more closely while also attuning us to the broader stakes and politics involved in the act of interpretation. We will discuss how theory deepens our understanding of the structures of power, social hierarchies, norms and narratives that organize our conceptions of what constitutes identity, belonging, home, and the human.

Over the course of the semester, we will spend time carefully unpacking the central arguments and ideas of theoretical texts from a range of scholarly discourses, including critical race studies, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and biopolitics. In order to facilitate our discussion of these challenging vocabularies, concepts, and debates, we will analyze the theoretical selections alongside short literary readings and strive to make connections between the works we engage and contemporary social and political phenomena.