Methods of Literary Study - bmc.ENGL.B250.002.F26
Section outline
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Prof. Pardis Dabashi
MW 2:40- 4:00pm
English House I
Office Hours: by appointment (English House 208)
Methods of Literary Study
Course Description: This course offers students a survey of the main trends in the quite long history of literary theory and criticism. As we attend to the philosophical and social perspectives that over the course of several centuries have emerged around the art of literature, students will also learn how theoretical paradigms often emerge as responses to previous ones. Students will grow acquainted with how major theorists and critics have attempted to answer seemingly impossibly big questions. What is literature? How can it be understood? What is its purpose? How do we—and should we—interpret it?
Required Texts:
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Norton, 2018.
James Joyce, The Dead 1914. Bedford, 1993.
These editions are available at the BMC Bookshop. I would highly recommend purchasing your books there. It is an independent bookstore that does a superb job at beating online prices.
If there are supplementary readings, they will be made available on Moodle.
*Readings should be completed by the day they are listed in the syllabus.*
Grading:
Participation: 25%
Midterm Paper: 20%
Final Paper: 30%
Attendance and Participation:
Your participation grade will be based upon the following criteria: attendance, verbal contributions to discussions, and level of preparedness with regard to readings. This class will be heavily discussion-based. Attendance and class participation are therefore required. You need to have completed the assigned reading for that class and be prepared to make thoughtful, interactive contributions to class discussion. More than two absences will likely start to impact your grade. It is not necessary to inform me of when and/or why you will be absent.
Electronic Device Policy:
This is an entirely analog class. I only allow written forms of note-taking; in other words, no laptops, ipads, or cell phones are allowed. This will allow for optimal immersion in the material, material which will need your undivided attention.
In-Class Presentation:
On the third day of class, I will be passing around a sign-up sheet for class presentations. Your job is to...
1. Sign up for one class session, during which you will give your presentation
2. Note down that date in your own personal calendar.
Take the time to make sure that that date works for you: there will not be an opportunity to change it.
Policy on late assignments:
You are free to submit your midterm paper any day between October 7th and November 7th. However, if you hand in your paper any day after October 19th, I will provide only the grade—no written feedback. This policy respects both your time and mine. There are no exceptions to this policy. Please submit your paper as a hard copy in my mailbox in English House.
You are free to submit your final paper any day between December 10th and December 17th. I will not accept papers beyond the 17th (no exceptions). Please submit your paper in my mailbox in English House.
Formatting and submission requirements:
Your papers must be in word.doc format, typed, double-spaced, in 12-point font (Times New Roman), and with one-inch margins on all sides. Include your name at the top of the first page in the name of the word.doc. Pages on all assignments must be numbered and stapled.
Note on Communication: I would love to talk to you. Here's how we can communicate. Because I receive such a high volume of emails, I have a strong preference for in-person communication. Therefore, if you have a question that can wait to be answered in the few minutes after class, please approach me then. If you do send me an email, please contact me via email only between the hours of 9am-5pm on Monday-Friday. I will respond to you in a timely manner (for me, that usually means somewhere between 24-48 hours). Thank you very much.
SYLLABUS
Week 1: Getting Our Feet Wet
8/31: Class overview
9/2: Plato’s Republic, Books 2, 3, and 7
Week 2: Ancient Beginnings
9/7: NO CLASS (Labor Day)
9/9: Aristotle, Poetics (p. 99-127)
Week 3: Christian Latinity and Early Jewish Interpretation Theory
9/14: St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 166-177; Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed,
180-188
9/16: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 191-194; Dante Alighieri, Convivio and
Letter to Can Grande, 196-199
Week 4: Early Modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Question of the Aesthetic, Part I
9/21: Baruch Spinoza, Of the Interpretation of Scripture, 314-326; Giambattista Vico, New
Science, 340-357
9/23: Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” 370-383; Samuel Johnson, “On Fiction,” 387-
390; “Preface to Shakespeare,” 392-405
Week 5: Part II; and The Romantics Part I
9/28: David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 410-424; Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgment, 429-263
9/30: Lessing, Laocoön, 476-492; Schiller, “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” 494-503;
Schleiermacher, 533-544
Week 6: The Romantics Part II; and the Emergence of Modern Criticism
10/5: Hegel, 549-563; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 590-597; Shelley, 601-618
10/7: Matthew Arnold, 684-710
FALL BREAK
MIDTERM PAPER DUE any day between 10/7 and 11/7 (See submission details above)
Week 8: The Modern Episteme: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Part I
10/19: Sigmund Freud, 789-819
Week 8: The Modern Episteme, continued
10/26: Friedrich Nietzsche, 740-762
10/28: Marx and Engels, 655-680
Week 9: The Linguistic Turn and the Death of the Author
11/2: Ferdinand de Saussure, 824-840; Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play"
11/4: Barthes, 1268-1272 ; Foucault, 1394-1409 ; Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1198-1211
Week 10: Critical Race and the Canon
11/9: W.E.B Du Bois, 845-853; Zora Neale Hurston, 938-954
11/11: Toni Morrison, 1670-1684; bell hooks, 2318-2325
Week 11: Postcoloniality Part I
11/16: Franz Fanon, 1361-1367
11/18: Edward Said, 1780-1821
Week 12: Holiday interlude
11/23: Achebe, 1536-1547
THANKSGIVING
Week 13: Postcoloniality Part II
11/30: Edward Said, "Secular Criticism"
12/2: Gayatri Spivak, 2001-2012
Week 14: Gender and Sexuality
12/7: Simone de Beauvoir, 1214-1221; Judith Butler, 2375-2388
12/9: Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix"
Final Paper Due any day between 12/10 and 12/17
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Statement on Accessibility
Bryn Mawr College is committed to providing equal access to students with a documented disability. Students needing academic accommodations for a disability must first register with Access Services. Students can call 610-526-7516 to make an appointment with the Director of Access Services, Deb Alder, or email her at dalder@brynmawr.edu to begin this confidential process. Once registered, students should schedule an appointment with the professor as early in the semester as possible to share the verification form and make appropriate arrangements. Please note that accommodations are not retroactive and require advance notice to implement. More information can be obtained at the Access Services website. (http://www.brynmawr.edu/access-services/)
Any student who has a disability-related need to record this class first must speak with the Director of Access Services and to me, the instructor. Class members need to be aware that this class may be recorded.
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Information about the College’s Sexual Misconduct policy, reporting options, and a list of campus and local resources can be found on the College’s website:
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I borrow and adapt this AI policy from my colleague, Marissa Fenley (Bryn Mawr), who has borrowed and adapted it from our other colleague, Olivia Stowell (University of Virginia)AI use in this class is, in every instance, unacceptable. Every assignment is designed in order to provide you with the opportunity to engage with the material and develop your own thinking without corrosive interference. Violations of this policy will result in a charge of plagiarism and treated accordingly (at the very least an automatic F on the assignment, without opportunity for resubmission).These are some of the considerations behind this policy:
- This class is designed to improve your writing, thinking, and imaginative skills; if you’re not writing, thinking, or imagining, you’re not improving.
- Using AI opens up academic honesty issues, both because it raises the question of whether the work is "your" work, and also because tools like ChatGPT rely on taking uncredited material from scholars and writers (see here)
- Using AI does not produce reliably accurate results (see here, here, and here).
- ChatGPT has serious negative environmental impacts. For instance, ChatGPT uses 7-10 times more energy than a Google search (see here), uses about one 16 oz water bottle for every 5-50 queries to cool its data centers (see here) and the C02 emissions for training a single large learning model are equal 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing (see here).
- AI is also putting massive strain on the energy grid (see here) and data centers are disproportionately built in poor and rural communities who are already the inheritors of environmental racism and classism (see here, here, and here)
- OpenAI and other AI companies have exploited workers from the global south, especially workers in prisons and refugee camps, and workers in Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere (see here, here, here, here, here, and here)
- AI is actively destroying knowledge archives and historical materials in order to consume, and ultimately degrade, language and discourse (see here).