Literary Criticism Reading List Classical Greek Plato, Ion, Republic Aristotle, Poetics, Rhetoric Hellenistic Longinus, On the Sublime Roman Quintilian, Institutio oratoria Horace, Art of Poetry Late Antiquity/Christian Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, The Trinity Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy Medieval Criticism/Scholasticism Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon Aquinas, Summa theologica Late Medieval/Early Modern/Humanism Dante Alighieri, The Banquet, Letter to Can Grande Della Scala Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Gentile Gods Rabelais, Pantagruel 8 (Letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel) Early Modern Sidney, Defence of Poesy Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier Bacon, Advancement of Learning Neoclassical/18th Century Pope, An Essay on Criticism Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” Rambler Number 5 “Of Spring” Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Lessing, Laocoön Aesthetics Hume “Of the Standard of Taste” Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Kant, Critique of Judgment Hegel, Aesthetics Romantic Criticism Wordsworth, Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, Biographia Literaria Shelley, Defense of Poetry Victorian Criticism Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, “Culture and Anarchy” Ruskin, The Stones of Venice Wilde, The Critic as Artist James, The Art of Fiction Marx Marx, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, Capital Freud Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," “The Uncanny” Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Reader-Response Theory Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum” Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology” Formalism Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, "Hamlet and His Problems" Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar” Structuralism Saussure, Course on General Linguistics Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method” Propp, “Morphology of the Folk-tale” Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics," “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, “Heteroglossia” Barthes, Elements of Semiology, “What is Myth?” Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth" Deconstruction and Post-structuralism Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense", The Birth of Tragedy Derrida, “Semiology and Grammatology”, “Differance”, “Letter to a Japanese Friend”, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” de Man, "Resistance to Theory" White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” “From Work to Text” Foucault, “What is an Author?” New Criticism Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," "The Affective Fallacy" Marxist Criticism Lukacs, Theory of the Novel Jameson, “The Political Unconscious,” “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Williams, The Country and the City, “Marxism and Literature” Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" Gramsci, “Hegemony” from Selections from the Prison Notebooks Psychoanalytic Criticism Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” Bloom, Anxiety of Influence Kristeva, Powers of Horror, “From Symbol to Sign” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Feminist Criticism Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" and “Sorties” de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic Queer Theory Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”, Epistemology of the Closet Butler, Gender Trouble Foucault, History of Sexuality Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” Race, Ethnicity, Migration Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art, The Souls of Black Folk Gates, “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey” Morrison, "Black Matters" hooks, Feminist Theory, Postmodern Blackness Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera Hamid Dabashi, "Can Non-Europeans think?" Postcolonial Studies Said, Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?" Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks and The Negro and Psychopathology Achebe, "An Image of Africa" Deleuze and Guattari, "What is a Minor Literature?" Anderson, Imagined Communities Frankfurt School/Cultural Criticism Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” "The Task of the Translator," "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” New Historicism Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," Renaissance Self-Fashioning Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment of Taste Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation Postmodernism Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto", “A Manifesto of Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations Jameson, “Nostalgia for the Present” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology Media Theory McLuhan, “Medium is the Message” from Understanding Media Ong, “The Orality of Language” from Orality and Literacy Kittler, “The Scholar’s Tragedy” & "The Mother’s Mouth” from Discourse Networks 1800/1900
