Problems in Literary Theory
Ruttkay Veronika
Wed 16 - 17.30
EC 23
Course Schedule
07 Feb
Registration
14 Feb
T. S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (TLC)
R. Barthes: “The Death of the Author” (MCT)
21 Feb
Cleanth Brooks: “The Language of Paradox” (LTA; TLC)
John Guillory: “Canon” (in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin,
eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition [Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1995])
28 Feb
NO CLASS
07 Mar
Michel Foucault: “What Is an Author?” (MLC)
J. L. Borges: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
14 Mar
Friedrich Nietzsche: “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (LTA)
21 Mar
Paul de Man: “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (in Sheldon Sacks, ed., On
Metaphor [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980], pp.
11-28; in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, intro and ed. by Andrzej
Warminski [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996])
28 Mar
Howard Ferperin, “‘Tongue-tied our queen?’: The deconstruction of
presence in The Winter’s Tale” (in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman,
eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory [London and New York:
Methuen, 1985], pp. 3-18)
[Jonathan Culler: “Jacques Derrida” (excerpts; in John Sturrock, ed.,
Structuralism and Since [Oxford, 1979])]
11 Apr
Luce Irigaray: “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the
Feminine” (LTA)
[Lynn Enterline: “‘You Speak a Language that I Understand Not’: The
Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale” (in Shakespeare Quarterly,
Vol. 48, No. 1. [Spring, 1997], pp. 17-44)]
18 Apr
Stephen Greenblatt: “Invisible Bullets” (LTA)
25 Apr
Alan Sinfield: “Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of
Plausibility” (LTA)
02 May
Edward Said: “Orientalism” (LTA)
09 May
S. Žižek: “The Sublime Object of Ideology” (LTA)
[Karl Marx: Capital (“The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret
Thereof”; LTA)]
Deadline for home papers
15 May
Conclusions
Assessment
Home essay (60 %); regular attendance and active participation (20%); occasional
homework to ensure preparation (20%)
Critical anthologies
LTA
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998)
MCT David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman,
1988; revised by Nigel Wood, 2000)
TLC
David Lodge, ed., 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (Harlow: Longman,
1972)
Some of the readings are downloadable from http://four.fsphost.com/ruttkay/elte/