Syllabus II.
English 244, 244H: Theory
As an alternative to teaching a survey of “schools” of literary theory, we might
conceive of a course that begins with a single, recent or classic, text that “does
theory” in particularly interesting ways, and then traces some of the genealogies of
the theory in that text, along with presenting some alternative approaches. The idea
would be to look at, in some depth, at least three theoretical approaches, while also
modeling the work of drawing connections between and among different
methodologies that marks much exciting theoretical work.
So, if one began with Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, one could look at how
Butler brings together psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructive approaches to
mold her own, new approach; one could then examine, in some depth,
psychoanalysis, feminism, and deconstruction, as well as the queer theory that
emerges in part from Butler’s work; and one could conclude the course with
critiques of Butler (feminist/materialist critiques like Grosz’s or Fraser’s) as well as
some other important approaches to the body, related to but distinct from Butler’s
(queer of color critique/intersectionality).
Or one could begin with Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious, look at how he
develops a Marxist, psychoanalytic, and structuralist approach; examine these three
as theoretical movements; and then look at critiques of Jameson and other ways of
doing historicism (post-colonial historical work like Chakrabarty’s; genealogical
approaches emerging from Foucault; New Historicism).
Following is one course that attempts to pursue such a model:
Weeks One-Three
This course takes as its starting point Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race:
Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. We begin by reading, carefully,
Chapter One: “The Melancholy of Race,” and consider how it takes up and
transforms Sigmund Freud’s formulations in “Mourning and Melancholia.” As we
read further – Chapter Three on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and
Chapter Five on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee – we move also to consider Cheng’s
use of previous work on race, gender, and post-coloniality, reading sections from
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and from Trinh Minh-ha’s Woman Native
Other, both used by Cheng in her reframing of Freudian melancholy. The goal
throughout is to understand the ways in which Cheng crafts new theoretical
positions through the engagement with, and critique of, others’ thought.
In the next several sections of the course, we move away from Cheng to deepen
engagement with three main approaches we’ve already seen at work in Cheng:
psychoanalysis; postcolonial critique; and feminism. We will read, alongside the
theory during these next weeks, both Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Cha’s
Dictee, testing theoretical formulations for their usefulness in reading the two works
we’ve seen Cheng interpreting earlier.
Weeks Four-Six: Psychoanalysis
Freud, from The Ego and the Id (rethinking earlier ideas of mourning and
melancholia)
Jung, on archetypes
Klein, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative
Impulse”
Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”
Brooks, from Reading for the Plot
Sedgwick, on reparative reading
Weeks Seven-Nine: Postcolonialism
Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth
Said, from Orientalism
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak”
Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”
Chakrabarty, from Provincializing Europe
Cheah, from Spectral Nationality
Students will, by this point in the course, have chosen a text to work on for
individual or group projects: their goal will be to investigate, in a series of
“scaffolded” assignments, how at least three of the theoretical formulations
discussed in class would be useful for reading that particular text.
Weeks Ten-Twelve: Feminisms
Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
Rubin, “Traffic in Women”
Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Anzaldúa, from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Weeks Thirteen-Fourteen: Roads Not Taken
In the final segment of the class, we return to Cheng to look at some alternative or
complementary approaches to understanding her material.
Diaz, “Melancholic Maladies: Paranoid Ethics, Reparative Envy, and Asian American
Critique” [asking what happens to Cheng’s model of melancholia (and specifically
the reading of Kingston) if, instead, we adopt a Kleinian/Sedgwickian approach]
Eng, selection from Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America
[deploying psychoanalysis differently, and asking more insistently about
masculinity that does Cheng]
Lowe, selection from Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics [strongly
emphasizing material history and politics]
Term Paper
One term essay of 15-24 pages, applying THREE distinct modes of literary theory to
a single short work of literature (a poem, a play, or a short story). The paper should
be submitted in three stages so there can be feedback that will let you rethink and
revise before turning in the final paper.