Foundations of Research in Literary Criticism
Formalism and Its Discontents
As an introduction to graduate study in literature, this course focuses on the formalisms that trace the contours of literature as a unique object, field, and mode of being in the world. While attention to form at some level must always define literary study, methodological and theoretical developments of the 20th century in particular make that attention a core locus of dispute and discontent. As a way of entering these debates, we will immerse ourselves in key moments of formalisms ranging from the Russians to New Criticism, from Levi-Strauss to psychoanalysis, from structuralism to post-structuralism, along the way asking about the property and properties of literary language, the technologies of meaning and dissemination, and the many crossings, vexed and generative, between aesthetics and politics.
Schedule of Readings
Introductions
24 Aug
Form Objects
31 Aug Samuel Coleridge Biographia Literaria
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1859
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Terry Eagleton, “The Rise of English”
Formal Language
7 September Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”
Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language”
Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such”
Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics”
J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words excerpt
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: “The Linguistic Foundation”
Michel Foucault, “The Prose of the World”
Literary Ontologies
14 September Culler, Structuralist Poetics: “Literary Competence”; “What is
Literature, and Does it Matter?”
J. Hillis Miller, “What is Literature?”
Louis Althusser, Letter on Art
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature: Introductory; Reading;
Form
Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Literature excerpt
Russian Formalism
21 Sept Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method”
Mihkail Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics, Two Aspects of Language,
Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry
American Formalism, aka New Criticism
28 Sept Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”; “Irony as a Principle of
Structure”
William Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy,” “The Affective
Fallacy”
Renee Wellek, “Concepts of Form and Structure in 20th Century
Criticism”
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
From Form To Structure
5 Oct Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” “From Work to Text,”
“Death of the Author” “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”
Foucault, “What is an Author?” “Discourse on Language”
Culler, Structuralist Poetics: “Linguistic Metaphors in Criticism”
Structuralism
12 Oct Claude Levi Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”
Culler, Structuralist Poetics: “Structuralism and the Qualities of
Literature”
Formal Economies
19 Oct Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: “The Dream Work”
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”
Slavoj Zizek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?”
Jean Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: “Numismatics”
21 Oct ENGLISH DEPT. STANLEY FISH LECTURE BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK
4pm, Student Center East, Illinois Room
Discontents: Dissemination
26 Oct Jacques Derrida “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourses of the Human
Sciences”; “This Strange Institution Called Literature”
Barbara Johnson, “Nothing Fails Like Success”
Discontents: Reading For Form
2 Nov Miller, “The Critic as Host”
Paul De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”; “The Dead End of Formalist
Criticism”
Geoffrey Hartman “Beyond Formalism”
Discontents: Strong Historicisms
9 Nov Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture”
Terry Eagleton, “Ideology and Literary Form”
George Lukacs, “Art and Objective Truth”
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: “On Interpretation”
Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism”
Discontents: New Formalisms
16 Nov Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism”; “Affordances of Form”
Susan Wolfson, “Reading for Form”
Marjorie Levinson, “What is New Formalism?”
Russell Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: “Why Literature Matters”
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Notion of Literature”
Angela Leighton, “Form’s Matter”
New Old Forms
30 Nov Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections