English 500:50/S 2007                                                                     Class Meetings: W 4:30-7:15/W-3

Office Hours:  T   1:00-2:15  p.m.                                                                    Office phone: 571-3622

                        W  7:30-8:30 p.m.                                                     e-mail: kbluemel@monmouth.edu

                        R   9:00-10:00 p.m. electronic                                Office: Wilson Annex 509

                        F   1:00-2:15 p.m.

                        and by appointment                                                            

 

Required texts:

Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd edition,  Ed. David H. Richter (Bedford)

Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. (NYU Press)

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Sigmund Freud. (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster)

 

Optional text:

Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edition, Terry Eagleton (Minnesota)

 

Course description and objectives:   This course assumes you have considerable experience reading literature but may not have had previous experience reading critical or literary theory. It is designed as a graduate-level introduction to what is a relatively new field in English Studies, seeking to explore not only the history and aims of it own practice by focusing on the major figures, intellectual movements, and social forces that have shaped both foundational and contemporary theoretical discourses, but also the history of theory’s complex relations with the subjects of traditional English study, namely those “primary” and “secondary” texts signified by the terms literature and criticism.

 

More specifically, this course aims to teach you how to recognize when you are having a theoretical conversation about literature and how to use new theoretical texts (feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, etc.) to expand, enrich, and strengthen this conversation. By the end of the course you should be able to put these theoretical texts into conversation with each other in order to come to a new understanding of how they support, challenge, or contradict your existing literary, critical, and theoretical assumptions. This course does not aim to teach you to “apply” theory to literature like a layer of jam on whole wheat toast, but rather to read literature as theory. Conversely, it teaches you to remain open to (the possibility of) reading theory as literature. If you get to this point, you have “fallen into theory”; you have learned to question the boundaries of the foundational categories of your discipline (“What is literature? Criticism? Theory?”) and are ready to return to the simple questions with which we will begin the course--Why do we read? What do we read? How do we read?

 

See Syllabus 500:50 and Policies and Guidelines

 

Specific class requirements and grading:

Class Participation (15%)

Oral Presentation (20%)

Mid-term paper (7-8 pages) (15%)

Final paper (18-20 pages) (30%)

Final exam (20%)

 

All class requirements will be graded on a ten-point scale in which A=100-90, B=89-80, C=79-70, D=69-60, F=59-0.  Within this scale, "plus" or "minus" grades correspond to the following example: B+=89-87, B=86-84, B-=83-80.