Instructor: Weissman
R 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
This course provides an introduction to the many literary and critical theories that have shaped central and contemporary conversations about the study of literature and culture. The primary focus is on modern and contemporary schools and movements, including the following: cultural studies, deconstruction and poststructuralism, feminist, gender, and queer studies, formalism, Marxism, New Historicism, hermeneutics and reader response, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and race and ethnicity studies. The course also introduces the topics raised by these theories, including the institutionalization of literary study, canonization, and authorship, gender, anti-theory and the defense of theory, sexuality, and the body, ideology and hegemony, literary history and modernity, the modern and the postmodern.