*Provisional Syllabus* Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies Fall 2016 ENG 200a Prof. Sherman Class Schedule: email: davidsherman@brandeis.edu Wednesday 2:00-4:50 office: Rabb 136 Rabb 236 office hours: Wednesday 11:30-2:00 and by appt. In this course, we will analyze several significant methodological and theoretical developments in literary and cultural studies in order to understand the intractable problems that have motivated dynamic academic work in these fields. We will return, from various perspectives, to questions about how imaginative texts mean, what they do, and how they come to be. Our themes will include genre formations and the limits of genres, ambiguities of authorship, the volatility of semiotic systems, cultural capital, literature s publics and counterpublics, the discursive nature of identity formation, and the role of political longing in the literary imagination. In our work on these and other topics, we will learn how scholars have developed sometimes as remarkable feats of innovation rich and productive questions that remain alive across the humanities. Required Books *Because these books are widely available at competitive prices, I will not order them from the Brandeis bookstore. Please make your own arrangements to acquire these books. You may use any edition. Note that many shorter readings, listed in the course schedule, are available on LATTE.* Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters Edward Said, Orientalism Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, v. 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Assignments: All assignments must be completed and at least partially credited for course credit. Position / Exploratory Papers: 4 papers, 3-4 pp., 10% each. Credit / No credit. See below for questions and prompts. Over the semester, please select 4 (out of the available 8) of the weekly questions about assigned readings to address in a brief position paper or exploratory meditation. These questions are designed to have you read more deeply into our texts, so please draw closely from them, with strategic quotations, as you prepare your work. And please be prepared to discuss these short papers in detail in class. Each paper is due by Wednesday 10:00 a.m. on the day of our class meeting. Final Paper: 60%. Either: A) Pedagogical Project. Create a unit for a humanities course (a literature or writing course, for example) that draws creatively from our reading and discussions this semester. The unit can be for any instructional level. The unit should include a range of interconnected activities that help students develop specific skills, ideas, ways of thinking, and bodies of knowledge. Your work should include: a) an introductory discussion of a pedagogical 1
challenge that this unit addresses, the course and school for which it is designed, and other relevant context, including any personal experience you may have had in such a setting; b) the pedagogical goals of the unit what it will teach; c) a detailed outline of the classroom activities and assignments that will teach it; d) a final discussion of how some aspect of our semester s readings or discussions inform your unit (which may be either implicit or explicit in earlier sections) and what your pedagogical use of these reveals about them. B) Critical Analysis. A formal 8-10 page critical essay that analyzes work by someone on the syllabus, or by some other relevant literary or cultural theorist or philosopher (please check with me for these alternatives). This paper will give you a chance to explore this person s thought more thoroughly, by reading more widely in his or her body of work. Make an argument about how this person s thinking proceeds, what concepts are most important for it, what it asks of us, what it s good for, why it matters, what it helps us understand; and, at some point, how we should reckon with some limitation or blind spot within it. The primary point of this assignment is to articulate the exciting critical possibilities opened by the writer you interpret, even as you also acknowledge the limits of these possibilities. This paper is a chance for you to make this complex, abstract, dynamic thinker your own. *Due Friday, December 16, noon* Class Schedule August 31: Introduction The task of the critic thinking about style some lines of poetry some lines of theory semester protocols and itinerary. Unit I. Opening Problems September 7: Lyric Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, chs. 1-3, Afterborn Virginia Jackson, Dickinson s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, Beforehand, ch. 1, Conclusion Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? September 14: Narrative Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Prologue, Introduction, chapter 3, Afterword John Frow, Character and Person, Preface and ch. 4 September 21: Adventures with Signifiers: Desire and Play Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, ch. 2, The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream ; ch. 6A, B, D, I: The Work of Condensation, The Work of Displacement, Considerations of Representability, Secondary Revision Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason since Freud Lee Edelman, The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive Jacques Derrida, Différance and Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey 2
Unit II. Conceptualizing Literary Production and Circulation September 28: Literary Capital Stephen Greenblatt, What is the History of Literature? Pierre Bourdieu, from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste and from The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, Introduction, chs. 1-3 and 6, Conclusion James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Introduction and ch. 13 October 5: Complicating Global Literature Edward Said, Orientalism, Introduction; ch. 1, parts 1, 2, 4; ch. 2, part 3; ch. 3, part 1 Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature, ch. 3 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, chs. 1 and 8, and from epilogue *October 12: Class Cancelled Yom Kippur* October 19: Morphology, Taxonomy, and Distant Reading Mikhail Bakhtin, from Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics (pp. 84-110, 250-258) and from Discourse in the Novel (259-263, 269-275, 289-295) Franco Moretti, The Slaughterhouse of Literature, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, ch. 4 October 26: Publics and Counterpublics Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, chs. 4-7 Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, Introduction, chs. 1, 2, and 8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, ch. 7 Unit III: Language and Power November 2: Ideology, Interpellation, Reification Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, part 1, section A, Idealism and Materialism, pp. 110-139 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping and Commodification Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Introduction and Afterword November 9: Discourse, Performance, Social Energy Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, pp. 3-82, 104-120, 135-177 3
Stephen Greenblatt, The Circulation of Social Energy and Resonance and Wonder Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Introduction and ch. 4 November 16: Volatile Ironies Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny Paul de Man, The Concept of Irony Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Prefaces, chs. 1 and 2, Conclusion *November 23: Class Cancelled Thanksgiving* Unit IV: Closing Problems November 30: Humanities and the Limits of the Human Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, from chs. 1 and 5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign vol. 1, First and Fourth Sessions December 7: The Limits of Critique Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Introduction, ch.1, In Short *Final Project / Paper Due Friday, December 16, noon* 4
Questions for Position / Exploratory Papers 1) Due September 14. Narrative. Both Woloch and Frow describe different constitutive tensions at the heart of characters in narrative: Woloch, between humanized personhood and structural functionality; Frow, between (stereo)types and individuated selves. Briefly describe the shape and significance of each of these tensions and, as a further step, critically contrast these two approaches to the complexity of character in narrative. 2) Due September 21. Adventures with Signifiers: Desire and Play. Select one concept from the following list to explicate and analyze. Think of this exercise as an interpretive discussion of a complex or recalcitrant abstraction. Extend this discussion beyond one author by making a connection to another to help you develop your ideas. The list: différance, play, death drive, overdetermination, critical signification / formal signifying. 3) Due September 28. Literary Capital. Address either of these prompts. a) Despite his critical genealogy of the category of literature, Greenblatt suggests that literature retains some irreducible aesthetic force or immanent textual charisma that can t be explained by dynamics of cultural or social capital. How does this suggestion seem to work and how would Bourdieu, Casanova, or English respond to it? b) Perform a Bourdieu-informed analysis ( Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier, and so on) of a contemporary cultural market that mobilizes some kind of claim to aesthetic distinction. 4) Due October 5. Complicating Global Literature. Said describes a potent form of cultural and political domination involving practices of knowledge production. What is his picture of the relation between power and discourses of knowledge? Turn to Cheah: what idea of cultural and political resistance does Cheah offer, and what might either Said or Mufti say about his idea? 5) Due October 19. Morphology, Taxonomy, and Distant Reading. Discuss Moretti s work. What do you find most bracing, startling, exciting, or disturbing in his methods for practicing literary history and interpretation? Develop terms for describing the stakes of Moretti s scholarly intervention. 6) Due October 26. Publics and Counterpublics. Address either of these prompts. a) Analyze a contemporary public, preferably one that you ve participated in. Using any terms from our readings that help, describe how it organizes relations between private and public dimensions of affect or identity, or any other complex aspect of this public. b) Develop a concept or picture of a counterpublic. To develop this idea, experiment with connections to readings from other units of our syllabus. 7) Due November 16. Volatile Ironies. 5
Address either of these prompts. a) How does thinking about irony involve thinking about temporality? Consider how temporality is involved in concepts of irony in any of our readings for today. b) Compare the political stakes of irony in Bhabha and Butler. 8) Due November 30. Humanities and the Limits of the Human. Questions to be formulated by the class. 6