ENG 5079 Spring 2020 Gontarski

The objective of this course is to initiate postgraduate students into the ongoing, institutional conversation called theory and/or cultural studies. If the objective is achieved, students should leave the course with a rudimentary historical understanding of not a single theory, ideology or perspective but with an understanding of how current controversies, schools, and practices within literary theory and philosophy (the two on occasion elided) have developed, and with an overview of some questions, topics, and problems that organize contemporary critical practice and philosophical thought. The course is thus not an in-depth study of any particular critical or theoretical approach, but more of an overview of theoretical possibilities, including those of digital humanities and the changing landscape of theoretical study in a digital, electronic world.

Over the course of the semester, then, we will read any number of texts that have been formative for the ways that literary, theoretical and/or cultural studies are conducted today. Some of these texts will themselves attempt to provide an overview or history of critical problems (Belsey and Rabate, say). Others will argue a fundamental position, or they may critique and reinterpret earlier texts (Deleuze, say). Some of the questions we will confront are (but are not limited to): in the sciences practitioners “do science,” but what do we “do” in literature; how do we “do literature”? That is, what precisely do literary theorists, cultural critics and/or literary critics study? What, if anything, distinguishes a specifically literary use of language from other uses? What is the relation of a literary text to the historical changes or political conditions contemporary with it and in subsequent eras? Is the text historically stable or fluid? Where and how do sexuality, gender, race reveal themselves through language? How are art works inflected by gender, race or other ideologies? What is an author, a text, a word, a meaning? How does the writing of an individual relate to the group(s) of which she’s a member? How do cultural systems function? How does text function in a post-Gutenberg world where text has become a verb. How has literary study altered in the midst of the Gutenberg Project.

Although it will be difficult not to get into debates over the correctness of any of the theories we study, we will try to avoid such entanglements as much as possible, since our primary aim will be to understand rather than to judge them. This kind of distance and restraint may not always be possible, but we'll make it an aim.