Graduate Course Archive Fall 2015

6100.10

Cook

Intro to Literary Theory
M 6:10PM - 8:00PM

Advanced Literary Theory
R 4:10PM - 6:00PM

This course explores a cornerstone of literary studies, reading.  Reading’s contested status as literary interpretation guides our opening move: an examination of longstanding and recent debates regarding the value of “suspicious” or “paranoid” reading practices against the value of “reparative” or “surface” readings, all of which involve claims regarding the hermeneutic and political significance of literary criticism.  We will attend to formalisms old and new to consider how reading’s rich object, the literary text, insists (through the guises of book and screen) on our attention to form, materiality, and agency. Assigned readings from antiquity to the Enlightenment and postmodernity will focus on such topics as literary art and aesthetics, close reading and history, neuroscience and the digital.

Enacting and reflecting on our own reading practices, we will spend time during the semester with two Chicano texts: Manuel Muñoz’s short story “Zigzagger” and Eduardo C. Corral’s poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes.”

B.A./M.A., M.A., and Ph.D. students will collaborate with the instructor to craft a semester-long project attuned to their particular educational and professional goals.  Everyone will write multiple short responses throughout the term in response to peers and assigned readings.

Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Revenge Tragedies
T 4:10PM - 6:00PM

“Human sacrifice. Gang rape. Mutilation. Ritual butchery. Mother-son cannibalism,” is one critic’s succinct description of a revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedies are dramas in which the dominant action is revenge for a real or imagined injury, and they were extremely popular on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. This course will examine the early modern development of this genre, analyzing the rogue-hero figure, the depictions of power and authority, the construction of female agency, the ambiguous nature of the audience’s sentiments, and current critical trends.

Twentieth Century: Toni Morrison and William Faulkner
R 6:10PM - 8:00PM

"Race, Memory, and Aesthetics"

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style.  We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature in the Twentieth Century through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender.  In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

Texts may include: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, Home, A Mercy, Playing in the Dark and selected theoretical readings.

Crip/Queer Theory (Ethnicity and Identity)
R 6:10PM - 8:00PM               

Crip/Queer Theory charts out key intersections between Disability, Queer, and Critical Race Studies. Our goal will be to mine the spaces between historically pathologized sexuality, ability, and racialized statuses. In particular we will focus on questions of "agential materialism" where one cannot only find experiences of oppression, but also alternative ethical maps for living. How are contemporary theorists beginning to conceive of bodies beyond the limits of social constructivism's passive, culturally inscribed surfaces? What can the artful navigation of inhospitable social terrains tell us about what crip/queer and racialized lives might offer as viable counter-cultural options outside of homogenizing norms? Key works covered may include: Alison Kafer's Feminist Queer Crip, Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics, Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering, Alexander G. Weheliye's Habeas Viscus, Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time, Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's The Biopolitics of Disability, Jose Munoz's Cruising Utopia, Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, and Robert McRuer & Anna Mollow's Sex and Disability.