Assignments

English 3900 Critical Theory, Fall 2022

TR 2:00-3:15 p.m., Atkinson Hall 107

Interpretation Survey

Spend a few moments writing all the questions you ask of every text you read or watch: a poem, a short story, a novel, a play, a film, a television show, a graphic novel. We'll post your questions here, and throughout the semester we'll compare them to the questions the theorists we're reading would ask.

Here are the questions our class asked on Thursday, August 18.

Author/Creator
- What was the author's purpose or intention in writing/creating the text? Is there a personal message being shared?
- What is the author's age, race, gender, and history?
- Why did the author choose the particular genre of the text?
- How do the characters reflect the author?
- What agenda might the work have?
- Does the writer or director consider the future (modern times) when writing the work?
Translation and Adaptation
- Is this a translation and if so, what influence did the interpreter have?
- Is this an adaptation?
Textual History
- What were the work's cultural, literary, and historical influences?
Audience
- Who is the intended audience? Who is the actual audience? Am I the target audience?
- What feeling does the work provoke from the reader or viewer? How does the work make me feel?
- Is the work enjoyable to consume? Is it meant to be?
Character
- Who is the protagonist? how are they characterized and developed? what is their motivation, desire, and mission?
- What purpose does each character serve?
- How do characters act as a symbol of ridicule or praise towards social and political issues?
- What character do I relate to the most? How is the author trying to sway my view of certain characters?
Plot
- Is the plot effective?
Setting
- What is the time period of the text?
- How does the text represent its time period?
- Can this text (if new) transcend its time period?
- Does the text reflect and comment on current or past events?
- Is this text proposing a question that is still relevant today?
- How does the characters' actions and relationships relate to the time period?
Diction and Imagery and Visuals
- What are some of the descriptive words used in the text?
- What do colors and scenery contribute to the message being portrayed?
- How are the film's visuals related to the story? What is the purpose of every facet we see, hear, or experience?
- How do the cinematography and soundtrack affect the overall meaning?
Form and Style
- What is the effect of the work's style?
- How does the medium/form of the work affect the interpretation of the work?
Symbols and Allusions
- What symbols are used?
- Are there any historical or biblical references?
- What are the literary, cultural, and historical allusions?
Theme
- What is the theme? What is the moral? What is the ideology?
- What major social or political issue is the author/director asking the audience to question?
- How does each component of the text work together as a whole?
- Is there one specific lens through which the audience can view the work, or are there multiple interpretations?
- Are the ideas relevant to modern times?
Reception
- How does the general public view the text and how does that contrast with what experts or specialists see and experience when reading or watching the text?
- Does the work pass the Bechdel test? Does it pass the reverse Bechdel test? Is this intentional?
- Does the work engage in stereotyping?
- Was the work and its theme received well or poorly from the audience?
- What was the work's cultural response or affect?
Representation
- How does the text represent minorities? and how does this representation affect them?

Here are the questions the theorists we're reading would ask any work of literature:

Formalist Criticisms: Liberal Humanism, New Criticism, and Russian Formalism
- Overview: What single interpretation of the text best establishes its organic unity from? In other words, how do the text's formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning, of the work? Remember, a great work will have a theme of universal human significance. (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 150)
- Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique": How does the work of art defamiliarize an object and make forms difficult in order to make the reader see the world for the first time, and thereby think critically about it?
- Cleanth Brooks, "The Formalist Critics": Disregarding the author's intent and the reader's reaction, what symbolic ideas and metaphorical meanings do the form of the literary work make?
- William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy": Disregarding external, private evidence, what internal structure and public evidence points to the meaning of the work? Without considering the author's intention or the emotional effect of the work on the reader, what does the work say (as opposed to do)?
- Sean O' Sullivan, "Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season":
- Herman Rapaport, "Tools for Reading Poetry": Analyze technical elements such as tropes (simile, figures of speech), elision, resemblance, juxtaposition, analogy, allegory, emulation, imitation, and so forth to determine the overall meaning meaning of the text.
Structuralism: Semiotics, Genre Criticism, Narratology, Interpretive Conventions
- Overview: . . . how should the text be classified in terms of its genre?
  - Analyze the text's narrative operations. Can you speculate about the relationship between the text's "grammar" and that of similar texts?
  - What rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to "make sense" of the text?
  - What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or “texts,” such as high school football games, television and/or magazine ads for a particular brand of perfume (or any other consumer product), or even media coverage of a historical event, such as Operation Desert Storm, an important legal case, or a presidential election campaign? In other words, analyze the nonverbal messages sent by the "texts: in question. . . . What is being communicated, and how exactly is it being communicated? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 233)
- Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics: Describe the ways in which the literary work's differential, arbitrary language or sign systems (the unification of signifying sound-images and signified concepts) construct its characters' and readers' reality.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth": Does the text constitute a variant of a broader generic pattern or operational formula? What contradiction does the mythic text seek to resolve or overcome?
- Roland Barthes, from Mythologies: Analyze the sign system of a large group of texts, like campaign photos or soap ads.
- Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?": What is the meaning of the author and their work, and how are those meanings tied to the literary discourse surrounding the author?
- David Herman, "Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology": How does the text innovate predetermined scripts? How does the story work engage and transform the reader's knowledge of the world?
- Michael Newman, "From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative" : Categorize the beats of the story, the generic structure of the episode, and the character and thematic arcs of the season.
Existential Humanism: Existentialism & Phenomenology, Reception Theory & Reader Response Criticism, Ethics
- Overview: What does the text say about how to be, to exist, to live in the world?
  - What experience of the world does the text convey to the reader?
  - What does the text do to illuminate and/or change the consciousness of our existential condition, of our being-in-the-world?
  - What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or of key portions of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that text? How does this analysis of what the text does to the reader differ from what the text “says” or "means"?
  - How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader’s response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story? To simplify further, how is a particular kind of reading experience an important theme in the text?
  - Drawing on a broad spectrum of thoroughly documented biographical data, what seems to be a given author's identity theme, and how does that theme express itself in the sum of his or her literary output?
  - What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted what text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text? What does your analysis suggest about the ways in which the text is created by readers' interpretive strategies or by their psychological or ideological projections?
  - If you have the resources to do it, what can you learn about the role of readers' interpretive strategies or expectations, about the reading experience produced by a particular text, or about any other reading activity by conducting a study using a group of real readers (for example, your students, classmates, or fellow book-club
    members)? (adapted from Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 180-1)
  - Describe the ethical judgments involved in creating the text and criticizing the text.
- Immanuel Kant, "Transcendental Aesthetic": How do the aesthetics of the text create representations that point to objects, ideas, and truths that transcend the empirical world?
- George Poulet, "The Phenomenology of Reading": Describe the textual consciousness that overtakes the reader's consciousness.
- Kathleen McCormick, "Teaching, Studying, and Theorizing the Production and Reception of Literary Texts": What issues prevalent at the time the text was produced affect its meaning, and what issues prevalent today affect the reader's interpretation? In what was can the contemporary critic's reading be historical, self-reflective, and resistant?
- Pierre Bourdieu, "Distinction": How does the critic's social identity, i.e., the collective identity in which they are a part, affect their interpretation of the work?
- Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics and the Face": How does the text represent or signify an authentic, other self? How does the text mediate self and other?
- Martha Nussbaum, "Cultivating Humanity: The Narrative Imagination": What does the text reveal about the way human beings have treated each other in the past and ideally how should they treat each other?
Poststructuralism: Deconstruction and Postmodernism
- Overview: How can we use the various conflicting interpretations a text produces (the "play of meanings") or find the various ways in which the text doesn't answer the questions it seems to answer, to demonstrate the instability of language and the undecidability of meaning?
  - What ideology does the text seem to promote—what is its main theme—and how does conflicting evidence in the text show the limitations of that ideology? We can usually discover a text's overt ideological project by finding the binary opposition(s) that structure the text's main theme(s). (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 265)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Will to Power": Does the text suggest that reality is a fiction? In what ways are the thematic truth or truths that the text conveys relative and contingent rather than absolute metaphysical?
- Gilles Deleuze, "What Is Becoming?": In what ways is the identity of the main character pulled in multiple directions and moves in multiple directions and must be considered in process?
- Jacques Derrida, "Différance":
  - "The Dangerous Supplement":
- Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (Structuralism): Describe the codes and conventions of literary discourse that work through the writer and express themselves in the current literary text.
  - "From Work to Text" (Poststructuralism): Describe how the literary text is not just a finished product wrought from codes and conventions of literary discourse but also in process and in play.
- Barbara Johnson, "Writing": How does the text break down conventional representation and liberate signification allowing for the reading process to observe a network of associations instead of a singular, ultimate meaning?
Psychoanalytic Criticism
- Overview: How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work? That is, what unconscious motives are operating in the main character(s); what core issues are thereby illustrated; and how do these core issues structure or inform the piece?
  - Are there any oedipal dynamics—or any other family dynamics—at work here? That is, is it possible to relate a character's patterns of adult behaviour to early experiences in the family as represented in the story? How do these patterns of behavior and family dynamics operate and what do they reveal?
  - How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, regression, crisis, projection, fear of or fascination with death, sexuality—which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior—as a primary indicator of psychological identity, or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
  - In what ways can we view a literary work as analogous to a dream? That is, how might recurrent or striking dream symbols reveal the ways in which the narrator or speaker is projecting his or her unconscious desires, fears, wounds, or unresolved conflicts onto other characters, onto the setting, or onto the events portrayed?
  - What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author? Psychoanalyzing an author in this [psychobiographical] manner is a difficult undertaking, and our analysis must be carefully derived by examining the author's entire corpus as well as letters, diaries, and any other biographical material available. Certainly, a single literary work can provide but a very incomplete picture.
  - What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader? Or what might a critical trend suggest about the psychological motives of a group of readers?
  - In what ways does the text seem to reveal characters' emotion investments in the Symbolic Order, the Imaginary Order, the Mirror Stage, or what Lacan calls objet petit a? Does any part of the text seem to represent Lacan's notion of the Real? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 38-9)
- Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams: If there is a dream in the work, what is the manifest content of the dream, and what might the latent content (of repressed wishes and traumas) be?
  - "The Uncanny": Does the work have an object that is alien yet seems familiar? From that object, what repressed knowledge returns despite and because of the character's anxiety regarding unconscious fears or desires?
  - "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego": With whom does the main character unconsciously identfy with and take as an ideal?
- Harold Bloom, from The Anxiety of Infuence: How does the author unconsciously misread her literary rivals, i.e., predecessors in order to create her own original work?
- Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience": What mirror or image establishes and provides a character her sense of self? With whom or what does she identify?
- D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena": Do the characters have conflicts with their relationships between inner psychic reality and external reality that might be traced to transitional objects and transitional experiences? Do the characters have any psychopathologies (addiction, fetishism, pseudologia fantastica and thieving) that can be traced back to their maladaptive relationships with transitional objects and transitional experiences?
- Lisa Hinrichsen, "Trauma Studies and the Literature of the US South": Does the work include individuals or society traumatized in such a way that their individual memory or collective history is denied or dissociated, resulting in a literary aesthetic of disrupted narrative and representability crisis?
Historical Criticisms: Marxist Criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism
- Marxism Overview: Does the work reinforce (intentionally or not) capitalist, imperialist, or classist values?
  - How might the work be seen as a critique of capitalism, imperialism, or classism?
  - Does the work in some ways support a Marxist agenda but in other ways (perhaps unintentionally) support a capitalist, imperialist, or classist agenda? In other words, is the work ideologically conflicted?
  - How does the literary work reflect (intentionally or not) the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written and/or the time in which it is set, and what do those condtions reveal about the history of class struggle?
  - How might the work be seen as a critique of organized religion? That is, how does religion function in the text to keep a character or characters from realizing and resisting socioeconomic oppression? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 68)
  - How does the context and content of the work relate to the social-class status of the author?
  - How does the literary genre relate to the social period which produced it?
  - How is the literary form determined by social, economic, and political circumstance? (Peter Barry, Beginning Theory 161)
- New Historicism Overview: How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical and cultural texts from the same period, for example, penal codes, birthing practices, educational priorities, the treatment of children under the law, other art forms (including popular art forms), attitudes toward sexuality, and the like? That is, taken as part of a "thick description" of a given culture at a given point in history, what does this literary work add to our tentative understanding of human experience in that particular time and place, including the ways in which individual identity shapes and is shaped by cultural institutions?
  - How can we use a literary work to "map" the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or the cultures in which the work has been interpreted? Put another way, how does the text promote ideologies that support and/or undermine the prevailing power structures of the time and place in which it was written and/or interpreted?
  - Using rhetorical analysis (analysis of a text’s purpose and the stylistic means by which it tries to achieve that purpose), what does the literary text add to our understanding of the ways in which literary and nonliterary discourses (such as political, scienti!c, economic, and educational theories) have influenced, overlapped with, and competed with one another at specific historical moments? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 300)
  - How does juxtaposing literary and non-literary texts aid the meaning of literary works?
  - How are state power and patriarchal structures maintained in literary and non-literary texts? (Peter Barry, Beginning Theory 172-3)
- Cultural Materialism Overview: What does the literary work suggest about the experience of groups of people who have been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented by traditional history (for example, laborers, prisoners, women, people of color, lesbians and gay men, children, the insane, and so on)? Keep in mind that new historical and cultural criticism usually include attention to the intersection of the literary work with nonliterary discourses prevalent in the culture in which the work emerged and/or in the cultures in which it has been interpreted and often focus on such issues as the circulation of power and the dynamics of personal and group identity.
  - How has the work's reception by literary critics and the reading public—including the reception at its point of origin, changing responses to the work over time, and its possible future relationship with its audience—been shaped by and shaped the culture in which that reception occurred? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 300)
  - What is the context of power and exploitation in which the literary text emerged?
  - What history is lost, and what history can be recovered in reading the literary text in the context of original and contemporary power and exploitation?
  - What are the dominant (conservative) social, political, and religious assumptions in the culture that created the literary work that emerge in the literary work? (Peter Barry, Beginning Theory 180-1)
- Karl Marx, from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: How do the productive and social conditions depicted in the work of literature estrange the characters from other people and their own inner worlds as well as limit their independence and freedom?
  - from The German Ideology: Describe the character's consciousness, which is produced by "the material activities and material intercourse of men" in the literary work.
- Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History": How does the author and/or the work of literature conceive of history? Is it universal (for everyone) or does it note particular class tensions in who owns the past and thereby controls the present? Does the work of literature go with the conventional flow of historicist history as progressive, or does the work "brush history against the grain"?
- Pierre Bourdieu, "Structures and the Habitus": What social structures in the setting of the work condition the characters' thought, resulting in the impossibility of challenging those social structures?
- Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses": What ideological state apparatuses (religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade-union, media, cultural) in or of the literary work cause an imaginary relationship of the characters or readers to their real conditions of existence?
- Michel Foucault, "Right of Death and Power over Life": How do social structures and institutions administer, regulate, and discipline characters' lives, for instance in terms of sexuality? What are the institutions of power and what procedural techniques do they deploy over the body to control subjectivity in the literary work?
- Giorgio Agamben, "Homo Sacer": Does the work exhibit contradictions and paradoxes regarding state power, such as totalitarian democracy and the inclusive exclusion of the sovereign being subject to its own laws? How do the judicial systems in the work structure the life of the characters?
- Louis Montrose, "New Historicisms": How does the literary interpretation of the literary text relate to the historical interpretation of the literary text's time period? How is the interpretation of literary text and its historical context affected by the critic's ideological position? Are there ways in which the characters in the work, the author of the work, or the critic resist the dominant ideologies of their respective discursive networks?
Gender Criticisms: Feminist Criticism, Gender Studies, Lesbian and Gay Criticism, Queer Theory
- Feminism Overview: What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy? How are women portrayed? How do these portrayals relate to the gender issues of the period in which the novel was written or is set? In other words, does the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology?
  - What does the work suggest about the ways in which race, class, and/or other cultural factors intersect with gender in producing women’s experience?
  - How is the work "gendered"? That is, how does it seem to deine femininity and masculinity? Does the characters' behavior always conform to their assigned genders? Does the work suggest that there are genders other than feminine and masculine? What seems to be the work's attitude toward the gender(s) it portrays?
  - What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy and/or about the ways in which women’s situations in the world—economic, political, social, or psychological—might be improved?
  - What does the history of the work’s reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operations of patriarchy? Has the literary work been ignored or neglected in the past? Why? Or, if recognized in the past, is the work ignored or neglected now? Why?
  - What does the work suggest about women’s creativity?
  - What might an examination of the author’s style contribute to the ongoing efforts to delineate a speci!cally feminine form of writing (for example, écriture féminine)?
  - What role does the work play in terms of women’s literary history and literary tradition? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 119-20)
- Lesbian and Gay Criticism and Queer Theory Overview: What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in, for example, the work’s thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
  - What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or queer work? What does the work contribute to the ongoing attempt to de!ne a uniquely lesbian, gay, or queer poetics, literary tradition, or canon?
  - What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
  - How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are apparently heterosexual? (This analysis is usually done for works by writers who lived at a time when openly queer, gay, or lesbian texts would have been considered unacceptable, or it is done in order to help reformulate the sexual orientation of a writer formerly presumed heterosexual.)
  - How might the works of heterosexual writers be reread to reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer presence? That is, does the work have an unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer desire or conflict that it submerges (or that heterosexual readers have submerged)?
  - What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) of heterosexism? Is the work (consciously or unconsciously) homophobic? Does the work critique, celebrate, or blindly accept heterosexist values?
  - How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual “identity,” that is, the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories de!ned by the words homosexual and heterosexual? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 341-2)
- Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women": Describe the sex/gender system in the literary work, especially with regard to how it does or does not oppress women. How do the relations of product compare to the relations of sexuality? Are women exchanged as gifts? Is there a double standard regarding male and female sexuality and psychologicial identity?
- Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence": How do the cultural institutions portrayed in the work, like patriarchy and heterosexism, control characters' sexuality? How does the work portray women-centered activities and sexual identities?
- Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa": How does the text challenge the phallogocentric stereotype of the woman as Dark Continent; deconstruct both the masculine/feminine, mind/body, whole/lack, self/other dichotomies; and write possibilities of self?
- Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination": How does the character performatively fabricate and construct her (gender) identity? Describe the character's psychic excess that is systematically denied by the social (gender) norms? Does the psychic excess erupt and cause a struggle between individual and heteronormativity?
- Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, "Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality": How are a character's sexuality affected by transnational flows, such as diaspora or neocolonial, of "medical traditions, conceptions of the body, scientific discourses, and, last but not least, political economies of the family"? In what ways are a character's sexuality identity produced by imperialist, multinational, global capitalism?
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts": Is characters' work, particularly women's labor, in the literary text gendered and hierarchical (for example, feminized and invisible)? In what ways do the gender, sexuality, race, and class of the characters intersect? Do the characters resist and oppose global capitalism's processes of exploitation and domination?
- Jasbir Puar, "'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess': Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory": In what ways is the identity of the characters in the literary work exist not only at an intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality but also as an assemblage or arrangement that is in motion and in the process of becoming?
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet: In what ways does the sexuality of the characters in the literary work challenge the heterosexual/homosexual binary in general and object-choice in particular? In what ways are the characters' sexuality distinct from their sex and gender? Where does the characters' sexuality fall on the continuum from intimacy to sociality?
- Jóse Esteban Muñoz, from Cruising Utopia, "Introduction" and "Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism": If the literary work includes gay characters and gay themes, do they pragmatically and rationalistically argue for assimilation and normalization of homosexuality, or do they idealistically and revolutionarily advocate for a future queer collectivist utopia?
Ethnic Studies: African American Criticism
- African American Criticism Overview: What can the work teach us about the specifics of African heritage, African American culture and experience, and/or African American history?
  - What are the racial politics of specific African American works?
  - What are the poetics of specific African American works?
  - How does the work participate in the African American literary tradition?
  - How does the work illuminate interest convergence, the social construction of race, white privilege, or any other concept from critical race theory?
  - How is an Africanist presence—black characters, stories about black people, representations of black speech, images associated with Africa or with blackness—used in works by white writers to construct positive portrayals of white characters? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 377-8)
- Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy": Describe the ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes of the text's diasporic or sub-national communities that have been deterritorialized across the globe.
Postcolonial Criticism: Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Studies
- Postcolonial Criticism Overview: How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression? Special attention is often given to those areas where political and cultural oppression overlap, as it does, for example, in the colonizers’ control of language, communication, and knowledge in colonized countries.
  - What does the text reveal about the problematics of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
  - What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anticolonialist resistance? For example, what does the text suggest about the ideological, political, social, economic, or psychological forces that promote or inhibit resistance? How does the text suggest that resistance can be achieved and sustained by an individual or a group?
  - What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference—the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity—in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live? Othering might be one area of analysis here.
  - How does the text respond to or comment on the characters, topics, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work? Examine how the postcolonial text reshapes our previous interpretations of a canonical text.
  - Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different postcolonial populations? One might compare, for example, the literatures of native peoples from different countries whose land was invaded by colonizers, the literatures of white settler colonies in different countries, or the literatures of different populations in the African diaspora. Or one might compare literary works from all three of these categories in order to investigate, for example, if the experience of colonization creates some common elements of cultural identity that outweigh differences in race and nationality.
  - How does the text represent relationships between the characters it portrays—for example, culturally dominant characters, subalterns, and cultural outsiders—and the land these characters inhabit? Does the narrator's attitude toward the natural setting, or the attitude of any character toward the natural setting, change over time? What kinds of relationships between human beings and nature does the text seem to promote?
  - How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? Does the text teach us anything about colonialist or anticolonialist ideology? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today 426-7)
- Edward Said, from Orientalism: Does the literary work reflect Western cultural hegemony, in other words does it engender an ideology and create a system of stereotypical representations in which its own discursive position the dominates the knowledge created in and by the so-called inferior East?
Cognitive Criticism
- Cognitive Criticism Overview: Discuss the character's interaction with
- Joseph Carroll, "Human Nature and Literary Meaning": Employing the Darwinian understanding of human nature, describe what the work says about the hierarchy of human motives; the tension between the author's, characters', and audience's points of view, human universals of meaningl; identity differentiaion; and conceptual content, emotional coloring, and narrative and sonic sequencing. What does the literary or film work suggest about a character's life history and cognitive style in terms of behavorial adaptation to social reality?
- Patrick Colm Hogan, "Literary Brains: Neuroscience, Criticism, and Theory": What do cognitive neuroscience factors linked to parts of the brain suggest about aesthetic value (for example, patterns and averages), ethical and political values (for example, the cognitive underpinnings of political concepts and moral reasoning), pattern recognition across genres or authors works (for example, aesthetic innovation in literary novels, parent/child separation and reunion in Shakespeare), and interpretation of individual works (for example, correlating a character's actions with the part of the brain that controls those actions)?
Ecocriticism
- Ecocriticism Overview: What do we mean by "nature," both in a given text and in our world?
  - How is nature portrayed in a text?
  - How are the characters in a text portrayed in relationship with nature?
  - How do the characters interact with nature, and vice versa?
  - How does the text demonstrate how humanity affect nature, and vice versa?
  - How does the actual physical setting of the text affect the text's plot?
  - How are race, class, and gender illustrated in the text, and how are they related to nature or the land?
  - What particular historical period is depicted in the text? How is this historical period related to issues of nature or the land?
  - Is the text challenging its readers to environmental action and promoting changes in how we treat nature? Other classes? Races? Genders? (Charles E. Bressler, "Ecocriticism" 237)
- Jennifer McDonnell, "The Animal Turn, Literary Studies, and the Academy": "How can attention to animals and their life worlds help us to think differently about aspects of literary form—fable, metaphor, story, say—that are shaped by ideas of human or animal being or by the logic of species? How do texts represent the animality that resides both within nonhuman and human animals? Or affective (emotional) or relational bonds between humans and animals?
- Michael Parrish Lee, "Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books": Describe the relationship between humans and things, humans subjects and objects in the literary or film text. What does the text suggest about consumption and/or the partial agency of things?

In Class Activities

1. Small Group Summary and Application

Today, instead of a single student summarizing Gayle Rubin's article and another student applying it, let's break the article into sections for small groups to discuss. First, summarize the section, then employ Rubin's concepts in a brief interpretation of one of our class texts (Rich, Achebe, Parks, Curtiz, Chase, Moore and Lloyd), and finally share your discussion with class.

Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," Introduction and Marx (901-5)
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," Engels (905-7)
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," Kinship (907-11)
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," Deeper into the Labyrinth (911-4)
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents (915-7)
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," The Political Economy of Sex (917-20)

Article Summary and Article Application

The informal article summary compels you to practice determining the key ideas of a specific theorist's essay, and the informal article application compels you to apply a specific theorist's ideas when interpreting a text. In order to develop tentative understanding of sometimes difficult ideas, you will pair up to discuss the article, and then one person will summarize it and the other will apply it. Over the course of the semester, you will both summarize an article and apply an article.

Article Summary

The article summary, which will summarize a particular theorist's essay, should

be 3-4 pages long,
be formatted in MLA style in Word format (I suggest using this template),
summarize the article's argument for approaching literature (if there are multiple articles on the syllabus by a single author, summarize only one),
quote and explain at least two significant passage(s),
define key terms,
and include questions that the theorist would ask of the work of literature

Article Application

The article application, which will critically read a text by applying a particular theorist's ideas, should

be 3-4 pages long,
be formatted in MLA style in Word format (I suggest using this template),
briefly explicitly pose questions that the theorist would ask a text (about a half page)
respond to those questions for text we're reading as a class this semester (about 2-3 pages):
- poem: Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"
- novel: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- play: Suzan Lori-Parks, In the Blood
- film: Michael Curtiz, Casablanca
- television: David Chase, The Sopranos, season 1, episodes 1 and 2
- graphic novel: Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Due Dates

Your written assignment will be due in either Assignments > Article Summary or Assignments > Article Application) two days before we are scheduled to discuss an article. Failing to submit to GeorgiaVIEW means failure of the assignment.
I will return your graded assignment to you in GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Article Summary or Article Application approximately one week after we discuss the article in class. Due to GeorgiaVIEW limitations, I am unable to return graded assignments to you unless and until you submit them to the Assignment dropbox. Here's how to calculate your course grade.
For example, we are scheduled to discuss Herman on Tuesday, 9-6. Therefore, someone's article summary and someone else's article application will be due in GeorgiaVIEW on Sunday, 9-4. It is recommended that the two students who signed up to write the summary and application, respectively, meet to discuss article's main ideas and how to apply them in interpreting an in-class text such as the Rich poem, the Achebe novel, etc. Each student will write their own paper (either summary or application) and post it to the class discussion board by Sunday, 9-4. I will return the graded article summary and application to the students the following week in GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Article Summary or Article Application.

Sign Up

Sign up here for two slots: one article summary (sum) and one article application (app) at least three weeks apart. Note that you will discuss the article with the other person scheduled to write about it as well as coordinate your summaries and applications.

Group Presentation

In the formal presentation, groups of three or four students (formed on Thursday, October 21) will collaborate to teach a critical approach to the class.

One week before the presentation, the group should inform the class of what 1 theoretical article it will teach as well as provide the professor with copies of the articles (if not in Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction and Literary Theory: An Anthology).

During the 30-45 minute presentation followed by 10 minute question and answer session, the group should

provide an overview of the method (based on Ryan's overview as well as an additional overview provided by your professor)

that compares and contrasts the method with at least 2-3 critical approaches previously studied, and also
that defines both the theory of the method and describes the practice of the method

teach one or two theoretical articles by a specific theorists articles can be found in Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology
- 3 member groups teach 1 theoretical article
- 4 member groups teach 2 theoretical articles
- see the professor if your method is not represented in the anthology.
demonstrate the method with an interpretation of either one in-class texts (Rich, Achebe, Gomez, Curtiz, Chase, or Moore and Lloyd).

Parameters

Time: 25-35 minute presentation, 10 minute question and answer session
Format: Use any audiovisuals you wish, like a Powerpoint, Prezi, or website
Due: The presentation is due on the group's scheduled date. One group member should submit the presentation file (if applicable) to GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Group Presentation.
Group Policy: Each group member is responsible for staying connected with the group, attending meetings, actively participating in meetings, doing her delegated work, i.e., contributing her fair share to the project. In order to hold singular members accountable in a team project, each group member should individually compose and submit to GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Group Presentation - Individual Evaluation a paragraph that assesses their own performance and their peer's service to the assignment. If it becomes apparent that a group member did not participate (skipped meetings, didn't complete her assigned work, etc.), that member will be assessed individually rather than receive the group grade.
Grade: Your assignment will be assessed in terms of understanding and presentatio of the theoretical overview, primary theories, and critical reading. Retrieve your graded assignment in GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Group Presentation approximately one week after you submit. Due to GeorgiaVIEW limitations, I cannot return your graded assignment unless and until you upload a file to the Dropbox. Here's how to calculate your course grade.

Sign Up

Exam 1

Exam 1 will cover formalism (Liberal Humanism, New Criticism, Russian Formalism), structuralism (semiotics, genre criticism, narratology, interpretive conventions), and existential humanism (existentialism and phenomenology, reception theory and reader response criticism, ethic) and will be taken in class on Tuesday, September 20. There will be two essay questions. In the first essay, you will be asked to compare and contrast two of the three theories from your choice of formalism, structuralism, and existential humanism). The second essay question will ask you to demonstrate and practice applying those two selected theories in interpretations of your choice of one text from either the poem "Red Riding Hood" by Anne Sexton or the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter. You may bring printouts of the literary work to the exam; but you may not use your textbooks.

Your theory essay will be graded on 1) your ability to balance a broad understanding of the general theory with a healthy amount of specific terms from particular theorists as well as on 2) your ability to assess similarities and differences between the two general theories.

Your application essay grade will be based on how you interpret the text; in other words, illustrate your understanding of the two critical theories by making apparent the questions a formalist, structuralist, and/or existential humanist ask of a text.

If I were to study for this exam, I would 1) create an outline of key terms and compose their definitions, 2) write practice essays comparing and contrasting two critical theories (formalism, structuralism, and/or existential humanism) using those keys terms, and 3) write practice essays interpreting the one literary text from two critical perspectives using those key terms.

Exam 2

Essay 1: Theory

First, select two of the previous three theories we have studied since the first exam: Postructructuralism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and/or Historical Criticism. Then compare and contrast 1) how two generic theorists, one each from the two selected theories, approach art, literature, and film in terms of meaning and 2) how two specific theorists, one each from the two selected theories, approach art, literature, and film in terms of meaning. What is meaningful and what constitutes meaning inside or outside of a text? Use and define key terms that have significance and meaning for the general theories and key terms particular to the specific theorists.
Note:Your two selected theories from Poststructuralism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and Historical Criticism must be consistent throughout individual essays and the entire exam. For instance, if you choose Poststructuralism and Psychoanalytic Criticism, then you must discuss Poststructuralism and Psychoanalytic Criticism in both essays and your specific theorists must be from the Poststructuralism and Psychoanalytic Criticism units.
Your essay should cover
1. a general overview of the first theory (Postructructuralism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and/or Historical Criticism)
2. a specific understanding of a theorist from the first selected theory
  - Poststructuralism: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes, or Johnson
  - Psychoanalytic Criticism: Freud, Bloom, Lacan, Winnicot, or Hinrichsen
  - Historical Criticism: Marx, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Althusser, Foucault, Agamben, or Montrose
3. a general overview of the second theory (Postructructuralism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and/or Historical Criticism
4. a specific understanding oa theorist from the second selected theory
  - Poststructuralism: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes, or Johnson
  - Psychoanalytic Criticism: Freud, Bloom, Lacan, Winnicot, or Hinrichsen
  - Historical Criticism: Marx, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Althusser, Foucault, Agamben, or Montrose
5. a comparison and contrast of the two selected theories

Essay 2: Interpretation
- First, select either 1) Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "Director of Alienation," 2) Alice Munro's short story "Child's Play", 3) the 2021-present television series Abbott Elementary, or 4) the Daniels' 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once; and then write an essay that compares and contrasts two interpretations of the text by applying general understandings of the two selected theories from Essay 1 as well as specific understandings of two particular theorists (but not theorists used in Essay 1). How would the particular theorists (both of your choosing, but not repeating a theorist used in the first essay) interpret the work with their particular versions of the general method, and how might the readings be similar and different? Unlike a traditional literature essay exam which would only require you to elucidate the meaning of the work of literature, your answer in this exam should explicitly exemplify the methods that guide interpretation of meaning. In other words, your essay should illustrate the differing interpretive theories that underlie the practice of criticism.
- Note: Do not discuss a particular theorist more than once on your exam. For example, if you analyze Benjamin in Essay 1, you cannot apply his theory in Essay 2 and vice versa.
- Your essay should cover
  - a general interpretation of the text using the first selected theory from Essay 1
  - a specific interpretation of the text by defining and applying a particular theorist's methodology from the first selected theory from Essay 1 (but not the same theorist)
  - a general interpretation of the text using the second selected theory from Essay 1
  - a specific interpretation of the text defining and applying a particular theorist's methodology from the second selected theory from Essay 1 (but not the same theorist)
  - a comparison and contrast of the interpretations
Parameters
- Due: GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Dropbox > Exam 2 on Tuesday, November 1
- Length: 5-7 pages per essay, 10-14 pages total, submitted in a single file
- Format: MLA style in docx or rtf format (I suggest using this template)
- Grade: You will be assessed on your understanding of 1) the two general theories, 2) the four specific theorists' methods, 3) connections and distinctions among the theories and methods, and 4) how to apply the theories and methods. Your graded exam will be returned to GeorgiaView > Course Work > Assignments > Exam 2 approximately one week after you submit it. Here's how to calculate your course grade.

Exam 3

Essay 1: Theory
- Compare and contrast Gender Criticism and your choice of any one of the group presentations theories (Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Criticism, Cognitive Criticism, or Ecocriticism). Be sure to address both the critical theory and the interpretive practice. Your essay should cover
  1. a general overview of the Gender Criticism
  2. a specific understanding of a particular Gender theorist
  3. a general understanding of the second theory
  4. a specific understanding of a particular theorist from the second theory
  5. a comparison and contrast of the two theories
Essay 2: Interpretation
- Select any work of literature (play, poetry, fiction, graphic novel, film, or television program; approved by your professor by Tuesday, November 29) and read it through the lens of any two specific theorists in the course (not overviews)
- Your essay should provide
  1. a focused thesis that makes an overarching interpretive claim, controls your argument, and structures your paper
  2. textual evidence from the literary work
  3. literary analysis of textual evidence adhering to the critical method of two particular theorists that we've read (do not employ general overviews)
  4. sufficient explanation of the particular theorists so that the reader understands how and why you're applying them
Due: GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Exam 3 on Thursday, December 8
- If I do not receive or cannot open your paper, I will email you the day after your paper is due. If I do not receive or cannot open your paper within two days of its due date, you will fail the paper and the class.
Length: 5-7 pages per essay, 10-14 pages total, submitted in a single file
Format: MLA style in Word format (I suggest using this template)
Grade: You will be assessed on your understanding of 1) the two methodologies, 2) the four specific theorists, 3) connections and distinctions among the methods and theorists, and 4) how to apply the methods and theorists.
- You can access your final grade in the course via PAWS after December 14.
- In order to read and assess all the exams and papers in my classes by the final grade deadline, I will not be giving feedback on final projects this semester. I am glad to put your exam grade in GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Exam 3 if you ask me to do so on your paper. I am happy to provide exam feedback at the beginning of spring semester if you email me to set up a conference. Here's how to calculate your course grade.

Student	Text	Theorists
Anna Durden	O'Connor, "A View of the Woods"	McDonnell, Rubin
Haley James	King, Gerald's Game	Cixous, Hinrichsen
Alana Kelly	Sophocles, Antigone	Butler, Carroll
Buffy Lewis	The Handmaiden (Chan-wook, 2016)	Spivak, Rich
Olivia McDuffie	Turning Red (Shi, 2022)	Foucault, Rich
Shannon Murray	Alderman, The Power	Hall, Mohanty
Mackenzie Pickle	The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)	Derrida, Lacan
Katelyn Pontzer	Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"	Marx, Mohanty
Katie Roman	Synechdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008)	Deleuze, Derrida
Sarah Sheehan	Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard	Freud, Kincaid
Max Van Voorhis	Richmond and Maxwell, Ride the Cyclone
Emma Whitener	The Nightingale (Kent, 2018)	Grewal and Kaplan, Said
Emma Woodall	de Maurier, Rebecca	Freud, TBD
Dennis Woolfolk	Thurman, The Blacker the Berry	Althusser