FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
COURSE OUTLINE
CL 305.01
LITERARY CRITICISM I
Assoc. Prof. Işıl Baş (isil@boun.edu.tr)
TThTh 445
Office hours : TB 425, Tuesdays 13:00-14:00 Thursdays 11:00-12:00 (By Appointment)
Literary criticism is often described as the scholarly evaluation or analysis of literature. This
course aims to introduce the students with the most significant Western approaches to
understanding and discussing literary works and to the idea of aesthetics and its relation to
truth and reality . Throughout the semester we will cover some canonical texts starting with the
works of Plato who is often regarded as the most poetic of the great philosophers to major
contemporary theories situating them within the historical contexts in which they developed.
MIDTERM EXAM 30%
IN-CLASS ESSAYS 20% (there will be no make-up essays)
CLASS PARTICIPATION 10%
FINAL EXAM 40%
Provisional Lecture Schedule
Sept. 28-Oct.1
General Introduction
The beginning! First there was…
Oct. 6-8
Plato , Ion
Republic Books VII and X
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth (selections)
Badiou, Plato’s Republic (selections)
Oct. 13-15
Aristotle, Poetics
Horace, Ars Poetica
Oct. 20-22
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
Oct. 27-29
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement
Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment
“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in
short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors
which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now
matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” F.N
Nov. 3-5
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral sense
The Birth of Tragedy
Nov.10-12
MIDTERM
Formalism and New Criticism
Nov. 17- 19
Nov. 24-26
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique
M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel
Structuralism & Semiology/Semiotics
Dec. 1-3
Dec. 8-10
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Roland Barthes Mythologies (selections)
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of a Folktale
Michael Foucault, The Archaeology Of Knowledge
Who makes Meaning?
Dec. 15-17 :
Dec. 22-24:
Stanley Fish, Interpretive Communities
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction
Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.
Beth H.. Friedman-Romell, Beth H., Breaking the Code: Toward a Reception
Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century
London