CL 305 Literary Criticism I, Fall 2015
Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu
Office: TB 475, E-mail: ozlemogu@boun.edu.tr
Tentative Syllabus
(Changes and additions will be made)
Course Description: In the first part of your Literary Theory and Criticism course, you will
study (parts from) the works of eminent thinkers/critics/philosophers of the classical Greek
and Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Neoclassical and Romantic periods,
whose ideas on the form and content of art and literature still continue to inspire aesthetic,
cultural and critical theories, which both draw on and challenge them in different ways.
Course requirements:
Preparation: You must come to class having read the particular material assigned for
each particular day of class, as indicated on the course plan.
Class performance: Regular participation in class (discussions; pop-quizzes; response
papers; group work).
Exams: You must attend both exams (the midterm, the final)
Important note about the final exam: A student who missed the midterm exam and/or the
presentation without a legitimate documented excuse, and/or whose grade average before the
final exam is below 55 is not entitled to take the final exam.
Assessment:
Midterm exam
Class performance (written and oral)
Final exam (comprehensive)
30 %
30 %
40 %
Required Texts: The course package will be available at the photocopy shop in the library as
of September 10, 2015.
Reading Schedule
Week 1
28 Sep.
30 Sep.
Introduction
Plato, Ion
Week 2
5 Oct.
7 Oct.
Plato, from Republic
Plato, from Phaedrus
Week 3
12 Oct.
14 Oct.
Aristotle, Poetics
Aristotle, Poetics
Week 4
19 Oct.
21 Oct.
Aristotle, from Rhetoric
Quintilian, from Institutio Oratoria
Week 5
26 Oct.
28 Oct.
Horace, Art of Poetry
Longinus, On the Sublime
Week 6
2 Nov.
4 Nov.
Saint Augustine, from On Christian Doctrine
Saint Thomas Aquinas, from Summa Theologica
Week 7
9 Nov
11 Nov.
Boethius, from The Consolation of Philosophy;
Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande Scala; Inferno, Canto IV
Week 8
16 Nov.
18 Nov.
Baldesar Castiglione, from The Book of the Courtier
Erasmus, from The Praise of Folly
Week 9
23 Nov.
25 Nov.
David Hume “Of the Standard of Taste”
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, from Laocoön;
Week 10
30 Nov.
2 Dec.
Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment
Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgment
Week 11
7 Dec.
9 Dec.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art
Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful
Week 12
14 Dec.
16 Dec.
Germaine Necker de Staël, from On Literature Considered in Its Relationship
to Social Institutions
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from Conversations of Goethe
Week 13
21 Dec.
23 Dec.
Friedrich von Schiller, from On Naive and Sentimantal Poetry
Friedrich von Schiller, from On the Aesthetic Education of Man