Instructor: Huh
Tuesday 3:30 PM – 6:20 PM
This course seeks to demystify and familiarize students with the myriad literary and critical theories that have shaped conversations around the study of literature and culture. We will approach theory as a working through a set of epistemological challenges collectively—a working through of questions, concepts, and problems with real, material purchase. The primary focus will be on both foundational and contemporary schools and movements including psychoanalysis, Marxism, New Historicism, feminist, gender, and queer studies, deconstruction and poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, race and ethnicity studies, disability studies, and ecocriticism. Because theory, like literature, invites a plurality of interpretations, your main tasks for this course will be two-fold: 1) to analyze theory as you would any piece of literature, exploring its convictions and ambiguities, possibilities and limitations; and 2) to explore those possibilities and limitations as they take dynamic shape in conversation with a specific piece or body of literature.