I am enrolled in this course at UVM:
Survey of Literary Theory and Criticism
Robyn Warhol-Down
This seminar introduces graduate students to a range of vocabulary, methodologies, and approaches that circulate in literary and cultural studies today. We will begin with excerpts from texts by Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir, and Foucault that have set the framework for much of current critical theory. Then we will survey major approaches from “New” Criticism and Structuralism; through such politically and historically based methods as “New” Historicism, Feminisms and Gender Studies; to such Post-structuralist ways of reading as Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic criticism, and Post-colonialism.
To ground our reading of theory in practical criticism, we will read literary and popular-culture texts to use as case studies. These will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and variations on the same story, including Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice.
In order to expose seminar members to a range of perspectives on critical theory (and to introduce them to a variety of faculty members in the Department), we will have guest speakers on most class days. UVM English faculty will talk informally about theoretical approaches in which they have special expertise.
Each student will be required to present a 20-minute oral “prolusion” (a close reading of a brief passage from one of our texts, taking the approach of the theory being read for that day), a 20-page annotated bibliography on a chosen theoretical methodology, and a 20-25-page seminar paper using that methodology in making an argument about one of our literary, theoretical, or pop-culture course texts. Students will also be required to do weekly writings answering a specific question about the assigned reading, to be collected as a Critical Log.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
