CL 306.02 Literary Theory and Criticism II
Spring 2015, Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu
Office Hours: T 12:00 Th 11:00 or by appointment
Office: TB 475 Phone: 6625 E-mail: ozlemogu@boun.edu.tr
Course Description: In the second part of your Literary Theory and Criticism course, you will study
(parts from) the works of eminent thinkers/critics/philosophers who left an indelible mark on the 20th
century cultural and critical theory. You will examine the ways in which the representative texts of
prominent theoretical movements in the 20th century such as Feminism, New Criticism, Formalism,
Semiotics, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism elaborate, transcend, challenge or subvert classical,
neoclassical, realist and romantic approaches to art, literature and culture. Kantian and Hegelian
aesthetics, the moral and aesthetic philosophy of Nietzsche, Marxist theory and Freudian psychoanalysis
will constitute a framework from which you can acquire a better understanding of modernity/modernism
and postmodernity/postmodernism.
Course requirements:
Attendance: You must attend at least % 75 of classes. Not to attend will automatically lower your class
participation grade.
Preparation: You must come to class having read the particular material assigned for each
particular day of class, as indicated on the course plan.
Participation: Regular participation in class (discussions; group work)
Quizzes: 4 best out of 5 quizzes will count towards your quiz grade. No make-up quizzes!
Exams: You must attend both exams (the midterm, the final)
Important note about the final exam: If a student misses the midterm exam without a legitimate and
officially documented excuse, and attends less than % 60 of classes without a documented excuse, s/he is
not entitled to take the final exam. A student whose grade average before the final exam is below 60 is
not entitled to take the final exam.
Assessment:
Midterm exam
25 %
Final exam
35 %
Quizzes
20 %
Participation (written and oral)
20 %
Required Texts: The course package is available at the photocopy shop in the library
1
READINGS
10 Feb (T)
Introduction
12 Feb (Th) Immanuel Kant
“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
17 Feb (T)
G.W.F. Hegel
from Lectures on Fine Art
Friedrich Nietzsche
“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”
19 Feb (Th) Friedrich Nietzsche
24 Feb (T)
from The Birth of Tragedy
Marxist Criticism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
from “The Communist Manifesto”
from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”
26 Feb (Th)
from Capital (from Chapter 1 Commodities)
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
3 Mar (T)
Walter Benjamin
5 Mar (Th)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
from Dialectic of Enlightenment
(from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception)
10 Mar (T)
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
from The Interpretation of Dreams
“The Uncanny”
“The Uncanny” (continued)
12 Mar (Th)
17 Mar (T)
Jacques Lacan
“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I
as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
from “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”
19 Mar (Th)
24 Mar (T)
Stucturalism and Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure
from Course in General Linguistics
Tzvetan Todorov
“Structural Analysis of Narrative”
Roman Jacobson
“Linguistics and Poetics”
“The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”
2
26 Mar (Th)
Julia Kristeva
from Revolution in Poetic Language (from Part 1.
“The Semiotic and the Symbolic”
MIDTERM EXAM in the week of March 30-April 3
31 Mar (T)
Mikhail M. Bakhtin
from “Discourse in the Novel”
2 Apr (Th)
Roland Barthes
“The Death of the Author”
7 Apr (T)
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Michel Foucault
“What is an Author”
from The History of Sexuality, Volume 1,
An Introduction
9 Apr (Th)
Michel Foucault (continued)
14 Apr (T)
Jacques Derrida
“Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the
human sciences”
from Dissemination
16 Apr (Th)
Jacques Derrida (continued)
SPRING BREAK: 20 Apr-24 Apr
28 Apr (T)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
from A Thousand Plateaus (“Rhizome”)
30 Apr (Th) Feminism and Gender Studies
5 May (T)
7 May
Simone de Beauvoir
from The Second Sex
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
from The Madwoman in the Attic
Héléne Cixous
“The Laugh of the Medusa”
(Th) Barbara Smith
12 May (T)
bell hooks
14 May (Th) Judith Butler
“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
“Postmodern Blackness”
from Gender Trouble (“Bodily Inscriptions,
Performative Subversions”)
3