ENG 5079 Fall 2019 Goodman

This is a course about the history of ideas. It asks us to think about the frameworks we use to talk about and analyze literary and cultural texts. It is therefore deeply engaged in the politics of interpretive frameworks. We will carefully read critical texts that were ground-breaking in their day and try to consider what they can offer to our understanding of our own contemporary world and scholarly practices. Most of these texts are known for their stylistic and conceptual difficulty. In parsing the ideas that currently circulate in the scholarly debates of our discipline, we will concentrate on some of the most compelling threads of inquiry in our field.