History of Literary Criticism
Fall 2014
ENG 171a
Prof. Sherman
email: davidsherman@brandeis.edu
office: Rabb 136
office hours: Thur 10-12, Fri 2-4, and by appt.
office phone: 781-736-8214
Class Schedule:
Tue / Fri 12:30-1:50
In this course, we will explore a wide range of critical engagements with literature from antiquity
until the present. Our rough, messy, open and for that reason useful history of writing about
writing will show us that literature is an inevitably moving target for critics and theorists, at the
center of a necessarily unfinished conversation. The premise of this course is that participating
in this conversation profoundly enriches our own reading and writing. This is a conversation that
asks, over and over: how does a literary text mean? What does it refer to? How did it come to
be? How can we understand its effects of pleasure and beauty? How should we evaluate it?
What historical, ethical, psychological, or other knowledges does it provide? What constitutes
literature as a category, how did this category come to be, and how has it changed over time?
Over the course of the semester, we will learn how to respond to these questions in both practical
and theoretical ways, moving back and forth between focused acts of criticism and more
speculative inquiries into aesthetics, power, identity, and language.
Learning Objectives:
 To become familiar with major figures and movements in the history of literary criticism
and theory in the West and to understand their relations among one another.
 To learn compelling terms with which one can describe, interpret, and explain literary
texts, and therefore to learn how to write about literature in theoretically-informed ways.
 To develop as a reader and critical writer by becoming self-reflective about your own
reading practices, that is, to be able to articulate your readerly disposition, interpretive
assumptions, evaluative habits, methodological commitments, and other elements of your
own critical procedures.
 To use knowledge of the history of literary criticism to formulate and pursue your own
compelling research questions in the field of literary studies.
Required Texts (available widely, including at Brandeis Bookstore):
Classical Literary Criticism (trans. Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch; Penguin)
Plato, Phaedrus (trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff; Hackett)
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Univ. of Chicago)
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Noonday)
Foucault, The Foucault Reader (ed. Paul Rabinow; Pantheon)
Many readings will also be available on LATTE
Rules and Requirements:
 Laptops may not be used in class except to access course materials. Bring other materials
(e.g., paper, pens) for taking notes.
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All assignments must be completed and submitted to receive course credit. Late work
will be penalized by one plus/minus for each day past due date.
Three unexcused absences lowers the final course grade by one plus/minus, and each
additional absence by another plus/minus.
Plagiarism will be penalized by failure on the assignment or course, appearance before a
university committee, and/or expulsion.
Students who wish to have reasonable accommodations made for documented disabilities
or Brandeis athletic obligations should speak to me immediately.
Grades and Assignments:
LATTE Posts: Ten brief posts about assigned readings on LATTE, due by 9:00 am the morning
before class on 9/5, 9/12, 9/19, 10/3, 10/10, 10/21, 10/31, 11/7, 11/14, 12/5. In a few sentences,
comment on what you find useful, striking, confusing, or otherwise worth further discussion in
our readings. Credit / No Credit. 10%
Class Presentation on Critical Discussion / Debate: A 10 minute presentation, from notes, on a
recent conversation or debate in a field that interests you. Identify a question or problem, explain
how it emerged, trace various responses to it, and make a claim for what is at stake in these
different responses. Bring a handout with helpful passages or an outline for your presentation.
This assignment is essentially to organize and summarize others’ work with your own final
assessment about why this conversation has gone the way it has (in this presentation, I’m more
interested in this meta-analysis than in what positions you think are most persuasive or would
like to take up as your own, if any). Examine scholarly books and articles in peer-reviewed
journals. The conversation or debate itself can be focused on nearly anything: a significant text
or passage in a text, an author, a genre, a period, a theoretical concept, and so on; the essential
task is to narrate a coherent movement in thinking about whatever object. Some examples of
topics: the ending of Huck Finn, the social function of contemporary elegy, the idea of narrative
omniscience, the ethics of war film, the middle chapter of To the Lighthouse, the concept of the
death drive, U.S. migration literature of the 1970s, the relation between the Wife of Bath’s Tale
and the General Prologue. In choosing your topic, avoid fundamental questions that would
require too much time and space—i.e., What is the Uncanny? or, What is gender?, or even, How
does Woolf represent gender?—by approaching it within a controlled context—i.e., How has
poststructuralism affected concepts of the Uncanny? or, How does gender work in Orlando?
The point of this paper is to recognize that, in one way or another, others have thought about the
questions that interest you, and that understanding their thinking will provoke your own. Credit /
No Credit. 10%
Written Analysis of a Current Critical Debate: A formal 7-10 page paper about a recent critical
conversation or debate in literary or cultural studies. An elaboration of your class presentation,
with a clear analysis of what values, principles, or agendas have shaped this conversation, that is,
that underlie its positions. (In other words, this paper is more than a catalogue of critical
statements, but a way to make deeper sense of how these statements relate to each other.)
Append a thorough bibliography of relevant articles, special journal issues, essay collections,
book chapters, and books related to your topic. Due one week after your class presentation.
40%
Intertextual Conversation: 5-7 pages. Describe the implicit or explicit conversation between two
critics or theorists on our syllabus. Identify their common concerns and how they help one
another—and us—pose their central questions. And, further, identify how they pursue their
concerns and questions differently, according to what distinct values or concepts. Which
elements of their thought are compatible, which are incompatible, and what does analyzing all
this help us understand about a significant issue in the world of literary studies? Due 12/10.
40%
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Schedule:
Fri 8/29
Introduction
Unit I: Imagination and Authorship
Tue 9/2
Plato, Phaedrus and Ion
Fri 9/5
*LATTE post 1 due*
Vico, from The New Science (para. 31-36, 177-189, 361-370, 374-384, 400-409) [LATTE]
Stevens, “Two or Three Ideas,” “Sunday Morning” [LATTE]
Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (ch. 1)
Tue 9/9
Shelley, “Defence of Poetry” [LATTE]
Emerson, “The Poet” [LATTE]
Yeats, “Symbolism in Poetry” [LATTE]
Fri 9/12
*LATTE post 2 due*
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [LATTE]
Benjamin, “Author as Producer” [LATTE]
Barthes, “The Death of the Author” [LATTE]
Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
Unit II: Approaches to Literary Form
Tue 9/16
Aristotle, Poetics
Fri 9/19
*LATTE post 3 due*
Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” [LATTE]
Èjxenbaum, from “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’” [LATTE]
Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction” [LATTE]
Tue 9/30
Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn” [LATTE]
Brooks, “Keats Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes” [LATTE]
Brooks, “The Formalist Critics” [LATTE]
Literature Lab podcast: “Adventures in Close Reading,” with William Flesch [iTunes]
Fri 10/3
*LATTE post 4 due*
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Bakhtin, from “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical
Poetics” (pp. 84-110, 250-258) and from “Discourse in the Novel” (259-263, 269-275,
289-295) [LATTE]
Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary
Tradition” [LATTE]
Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology” [LATTE]
Tue 10/7
Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (chs. 2, 5 and “Afterborn”)
Unit III: Pleasure, Taste, Canonization
Fri 10/10
*LATTE post 5 due*
Plato, Republic (Books II, III, and X)
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (ch. XIV) [LATTE]
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (selections, according to your pleasure...)
Tue 10/14
Longinus, “On the Sublime” (chs. I, VII-X, XIII, )
Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
[LATTE]
Kant, from Critique of the Power of Judgment [LATTE]
Fri 10/17
Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” [LATTE]
Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” [LATTE]
Pater, The Renaissance (“Preface” and “Conclusion”); Imaginary Portraits (“The Child in the
House”) [LATTE]
Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray [LATTE]
Tue 10/21
*LATTE post 6 due*
Bourdieu, from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste and from The Rules of
Art: Genesis and Stucture [LATTE]
English, from The Economy of Prestige [LATTE]
Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” [LATTE]
Unit IV: Structures and Systems
Fri 10/24: Structuralism and Semiotics
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (pp. 65-78, 101-127) [LATTE]
Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” (pp. 206-217, 229-230) [LATTE]
Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” [LATTE]
Tue 10/28: Marxism
Karl Marx, Capital v. 1, “The Commodity,” pp. 125-177; “The Sale and Purchase of LabourPower,” pp. 270-280; “Theses on Feuerbach” [LATTE]
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, part 1, section A, “Idealism and
Materialism” (pp. 110-139) [LATTE]
David Harvey, “Dialectics” [LATTE]
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (“Form and Content”) [LATTE]
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (pp. 306-9) [LATTE]
Fri 10/31: Marxism, cont.
*LATTE post 7 due*
James Scully, “Line Break” [LATTE]
Irigaray, “Women on the Market” [LATTE]
Lowe, “Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics” [LATTE]
Tue 11/4: Psychoanalysis
Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, ch. 2, “The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis
of a Specimen Dream”; ch. 6A, B, D, I: “The Work of Condensation,” “The Work of
Displacement,” “Considerations of Representability,” “Secondary Revision”;
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, chs. 17-19, “The Sense of Symptoms,”
“Fixation to Traumas—The Unconscious,” “Resistance and Repression” [LATTE]
Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason since Freud” [LATTE]
Fri 11/7: Psychoanalysis, cont.
*LATTE post 8 due*
Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language [LATTE]
Johnson, “Muteness Envy” [LATTE]
Miller, “Anal Rope” [LATTE]
Tue 11/11: Deconstruction
Barthes, “From Work to Text” [LATTE]
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” and “Différance”
[LATTE]
Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric” [LATTE]
Fri 11/14: Deconstruction, cont.
*LATTE post 9 due*
Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation” [LATTE]
Gates, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” and “The Blackness of Blackness: A
Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey” [LATTE]
Unit V: Genealogical Criticism
Tue 11/18
Nietzsche, preface, Genealogy of Morality [LATTE]
Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” [LATTE]
Foucault, preface, The Order of Things [LATTE]; “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” “Right of
Death and Power over Life,” “We ‘Other Victorians,’” “The Repressive Hypothesis”
Fri 11/21
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Foucault, “Docile Bodies”
Greif, “Against Exercise” [LATTE]
Said, from Orientalism [LATTE]
Tue 11/25
Chow, “Gender and Representation” [LATTE]
Butler, from Gender Trouble [LATTE]
Tue 12/
Greenblatt, “What Is the History of Literature?”, “Resonance and Wonder,” “The Circulation of
Social Energy” [LATTE]
Unit VI: Literature and the World
Fri 12/5
*LATTE post 10 due*
Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic” [LATTE]
Dimock, “Literature for the Planet” [LATTE]
*Intertextual Conversation Due, Wed., December 10, noon, in my mailbox*
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