Assignments

English 3900 Critical Theory, Fall 2023

TR 2:00-3:15 p.m., Arts & Sciences 340A

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 Tuesday, August 22.

Author
- Who wrote the text or produced the work? What other work did the author write/produce? What is the creator's background, identity, lifestyle, etc.?
- If the work was produced by a team, how did they interact?
- Why did the author write the work? What meaning did she intend? Has the author released commentary on their own work?
- How does the creator appear to feel about the characters?
- What steps did the author take to ensure there is diversity in the work, if any?
- What caused this work to be made?
- What is the historical context in which the work was created?
Character
- Who is the main character and why?
- Is the protagonist a good person? Is the antagonist a bad person?
- Are the characters based on real people and events?
- How do the characters relate to each other? Are the characters friend, enemies, etc.?
- What drives the characters? What are their flaws and strengths?
- Which characters are sympathetic or unlikeable or neutral and why?
- Why did the character fail at the end?
Point of View
- Is the narration reliable?
Plot and Conflict
- What is the central tension driving the plot?
- What is the relationship between the central tension/plot and the main characters?
Setting
- Where is the story taking place?
- How does the setting affect the characters and plot?
Symbol
- What is the symbolism behind the text, for example in colors and scenery?
- What stereotypes, tropes, cliches, or archetypes are present in the work?
Tone
- Does this text succeed at fostering a feeling or mood? How does it contribute to the theme?
Style
- Is there a meaning behind the way in which the work is written?
Allusion
- Does the work allude to an another text?
Genre
- What is the format of the work and how does that impact its meaning?
Theme and Significance
- What is the goal, message, lesson, or ethical code of the work?
- Why is the work important? Did it matter when it was written? Why does it matter now?
Reader
- Do I take any issue with the text?
- What do I get out of the work? What am I supposed to be learning? How can the text be applied to my life?
- How would I have responded to the work five years ago?
- Is the work rereadable/rewatchable?
Audience
- Who was the original audience? Who is the current audience?
- Is the audience targeted or more general?
- How did the work impact society at the time?
Adaptation
- Has the work been adapted, or is it an adaptation of another text?
Representation
- How does this piece portray women/femininity?
- How does this piece portray men/masculinity?
- How does this piece portray sexuality, especially queerness?
- How does this piece portray racial minorities and racial dynamics?
Literary History
- Does this text subvert or follow the works that came before it?

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 133)
- John Crowe Ransom, "Criticism, Inc.": Without considering external factors like Marxist and New Humanist morality or reader emotion, what does the scientific, systematic business of criticism reveal about the work of literature?
- Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase": Without paraphrasing the work, what is the essential and meaningful poetic/artistic structure of the literary text?
- 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?
  - "The Affective Fallacy": 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)?
- T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent": Describe the meaning of the work of literature in relation to its literary tradition. What new emotions does the work of literature create from the raw material of personality that the writer seeks to escape?
- F. R. Leavis, from The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad: How does the work "not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers" but promotoes an "awareness of the possibilities of life"?
Structuralism
- 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.
- Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics": Describe how the structure of the work depends on its predominant poetic function, and analyze how the other five functions (referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual) form the text.
  - from "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances": What literary devices (such as metaphor and metonymy) does the literary work or literary genre tend to foreground and how so?
- Northrop Frye, "The Archetypes of Literature": How should the literary work be categorized in terms of season and genre (spring romance, summer comedy, autumn tragedy, winter satire)?
- Tzvetan Todorov, "Structural Analysis of Narrative": What repeated narrative patterns undergird the literary text?
- Roland Barthes, from Mythologies: Describe the sign system of a large group of texts, like campaign photos or soap ads.
  - "The Death of the Author": Describe the codes and conventions of literary discourse that work through the writer and express themselves in the current literary text.
Post-Structuralism, 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)
- Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text": 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.
- Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?": What is the meaning of the author and her work, and how are those meanings tied to the literary discourse surrounding the author?
  - from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: What is the main character's subject position with regard to various institutions and discourses? How is the identity of the main character created by the institution(s) that discipline her?
  - from The History of Sexuality: How is the main character's interiority (her subjectivity, her sexuality) regulated by her discourse communities?
- Jacques Derrida, from Of Grammatology: How does the literary text produce excessive or exorbitant meaning? In what ways is the meaning of the literary text undecidable?
- Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric": What valid yet mutually exclusive readings of the text make interpretation undecidable? How does the reading of the text end up in indetermination (suspended uncertainty) or negative certainty? How does the literary text simultaneously assert and deny the authority of its own rhetorical mode?
- J. L. Austin, "Performative Utterances": Rather than the true/false dichotomy of literary reference, describe the ambiguity, meaning, and force of the literary statement.
- Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble: How is a character's body (and therefore interiority) culturally inscribed? How does the character performatively fabricate and construct her (gender) identity?
- Jean Baudrillard, from "The Precession of Simulacra": In what ways does the cultural setting within and of the literary text simulate reality without original reference; in other words, how does the text substitute signs of the real for the real itself and thereby create a hyperreal play of illusions, phantasms, and imaginary?
- 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?
Psychoanalysis
- 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?
  - How can characters' behavior be understood in terms of core issues? What defenses seem to be operating to repress characters' awareness of their core issues? How does such an interpretation help us better understand the story?
  - Does the work illustrate sibling rivalry, the Oedipal conflict, or any other psychoanalytic family dynamics? That is, is it possible to relate a character's patterns of adult dysfunctional behavior to early experiences in the family as that family is 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, or images be explained in terms of fear of death (which can manifest itself as fascination with death) or in terms of a destructive relationship to the sexual (which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior) as psychoanalysis understands these concepts?
  - 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? Do any Lacanian concepts account for so much of the text that we might say the text is structured by one or more of those concepts? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 3rd and 4th editions)
- Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams: What unconscious Oedipal guilt and castration anxiety might a character (like Hamlet) have? What unconscious fears and desires do the character's dreams symbolize?
  - from "The Uncanny": Does the work have an object that seems familiar yet alien? From that object, what repressed knowledge returns despite and because of the character's anxiety regarding unconscious fears or desires?
  - "Fetishism": Does a character disavow the reality of loss and the symbolics of castration by imbuing an object or idea with sexual potency?
- Harold Bloom, from The Anxiety of Influence: 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": What mirror or image establishes and provides a character her sense of self? With whom or what does she identify?
  - "The Signification of the Phallus": How do characters feign possession of phallic power?
- Julia Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language: How do the underlying drives of the text and character break through and transform the conventional symbolic order of the work?
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Does the book shatter linear unity? Does the work deterritorialize (unbind and unbound) traditional Freudian circuits of desire?
- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Leitch 2081-95): Describe which character the audience is supposed to identify with. When looking through the eyes of this character, do women function as femme fatales, in other words, as desirable yet castrating sex objects?
- Kaplan, from Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature: Do the characters suffer from "a breach in the protective shield [of] mental apparatuses"? How are characters motivated by unconscious traumatic triggers?
Historical Criticisms: Marxist Criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Criticism
- 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? That is, in what way does the text reveal, and invite us to condemn, oppressive socioeconomic forces (including repressive socioeconomic ideology)?
  - 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 operations of capitalism, classism, history of class struggle (the conflict between underpaid workers and the wealthy ruling class) at that point in history?
  - 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, 4th ed. 57)
  - 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 work interact with (support, question, undermine) a particular belief prevalent at the time and place the work was written . . . as that belief was circulated in various cultural artifacts of the period?
  - How can we use a literary work to help "map" the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged? 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?
- Cultural Criticism Overview: What does the literary work, in tandem with evidence from the popular culture of the period during which the work was written, suggest about the experience of—or debates about—groups of people who have been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented by traditional history, such as working-class people, prisoners, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, children, the homeless, and the mentally ill? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 4th ed. 258)
  - 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.
- György (Georg) Lukács, from The Historical Novel (Leitch 905-21): What is the essence or totality of the work in terms of the dialectic between immediate subjective experience and objective reality of historical, economic living conditions?
- Terry Eagleton, "Categories for a Materialist Criticism": What are the social relations among the general mode of production and the literary mode of production? What are the relations among the general ideology, the authorial ideology, and the aesthetic ideology that produce the literary text?
- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility": Does the literary work have an authenticity or aura, a ritualistic or cultic quality surrounding its experience? Is the work exhibited to the masses (the cineplex of mass reproducibility and mass consumption) or the individual (museum of the sacred experience of art)?
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from "The Culture Industry": What does the literary work suggest, either intrinsically in terms of ideological theme, or extrinsically in terms of the relationship between the work and reality, about the relationship between pleasure and labor (or, more classically, from Marlowe, profit and delight)? What does the literary work do to the thinking individual, the viewer or reader (or, more classically, from Socrates, the contemplative life)?
- Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory": Inside the text, how does the ideological superstructure reflect the economic base ("the real social existence of man") of the society portrayed in the work of literature? Does the work portray one group in authority dominating over another ideologically and economically (hegemony)? Outside the text, what is the relationship of the literary work to the conditions of cultural and ideological practice in the world? Does the literary work express the dominant hegemony or an alternate practice?
- Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act: How does the text, as a political act, reflect the historical events of the time period in which it was written? How does the text represent the class conflicts of the characters inside the text and the external social tensions that produced the text? What is the relationship between the form of the text and the ideology of the time period that produced it?
- Louis Althusser, from "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?
- Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies": Examine the representations of power—politics, race, class, and gender subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc." in the text.
- Dick Hebdige, from Subculture: The Meaning of Style: If there is a subculture group represented in the text, what are its signs and how does it challenge the symbolic world of the dominant culture?
Reader-Response Criticism
- Reader-Response Criticism Overview
  - Drawing on concepts from transactional reader-response theory, explain how the interaction between the literary text and the reader creates meaning. Specifically, how do moments of indeterminacy in the text function as a stimulus to interpretation? . . . . How, exactly, does the text lead us to modify our interpretation as we read?
  - Drawing on concepts from affective stylistics, explain what a "slow-motion," phrase-by-phrase or line-by-line analysis of a short literary text (for example, a short poem), or of a key portion of a longer text, tells us about the reader's moment-by-moment reading experience.
  - Drawing on concepts from subjective reader-response theory, see what you can learn about the interpretive role played by the expectations readers bring to a particular text, by the interpretive strategies they use on that text, or by the experiences they have while reading that text by conducting your own mini-study using a group of real readers. . . .
  - Drawing on concepts from psychological reader-response theory, examine your own intepretations of literary works—a collection of essays you've written for literature classes should work for this purpose—to see if you can discover your identity theme, which is projected onto the literature you read and results in your literary intepretations. Or, if you're feeling ambitious, collect a broad spectrum of thoroughly documented biographical data, and see if you can discover what seems to be your favorite author's identity them. How does this theme express itself in this author's literary production.
  - Drawing on concepts from social reader-response theory, examine the body of criticism published about a literary text during a given time period to see what it suggests about the shared cultural assumpts of the critics who interpreted the text. What shared cultural beliefs . . . seem to have influenced the ways in which literary critics responded at that point in time to that literary text? (Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 4th ed. 166-7)
- Stanley E. Fish, from Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities: What are the interpretive operations that a particular community of critics use to make meaning from or impose onto a text?
Lesbian Criticism, Gay Criticism, and Queer Theory
- Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Criticism Overview: Does the literary work seem to reinforce or undermine heteropatriarchal ideology? For example, how are LGBTQ characters portrayed? Are there characters, whatever their sexual orientation, who don't conform to heteropatriarchal gender norms, and, if so, how are they portrayed? How do these portrayals relate to issues of sexuality and gender identity during the period in which the work was written or is set? If the work contains heterosexist, monosexist, or cissexist characters, does the work invite us to criticize their bigotry by portraying thse biases negatively, or does the work reinforce those biases by portraying the as natural or even honorable?
  - What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, and/or psychologically) of homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, transphobia, or queerphobia? For example, does the work include characters who exhibit any of these phobias or who have internalized them as self hatred, and, if so, does the text criticize, celebrate, or blindly accept their phobias?
  - What does the work contribute to our knowledge of LGBTQ experience and history, that is, to our understanding of the conditions under which LGBTQ people have lived and how they have dealth with institutionalized discrimination and phobic response to LGBTQ sexuality?
  - How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in literary texts that are apparently heterosexual but that were written by writers we now know or have reason to believe were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer? (This analysis is usually done for works by writers who lived at a time when openly representing LGBTQ experience would have been considered unacceptable, or it is done in order to correct inaccurate information concerning the sexual orientation or gender identity of a writer erroneously presumed to have been heterosexual or cisgender.)
- 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?
Feminism & Gender Studies
- 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)
- 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?
- Susan Bordo, from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body: How do women's bodies serve as a text of the culture at play in the work? How are women's bodies paradoxically disciplined and disordered and also constituted and practiced by the social forces in the work?
Postcolonial Criticism
- 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?

In Class Activities

1. TBA

TBA

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)
select one work of literature below and respond to that work using the theorist's questions (about 2-3 pages):
- novel: Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem | 2 | 3
- poem: Rich, "Planetarium"
- play: Lori-Parks, In the Blood
- film: Wilder, Sunset Boulevard
- television show: Waller-Bridge, Flea Bag, season 1, episodes 1 and 2
- graphic novel: Moore and Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke

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 Frye on Tuesday, 9-5. Therefore, someone's article summary and someone else's article application will be due in GeorgiaVIEW on Sunday, 9-3. 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 Conde novel, etc. Each student will write their own paper (either summary or application) and post it to the class discussion board by Sunday, 9-3. 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 Tuesday, November 7) will collaborate to teach a critical theory to the class. Theories include, but are not limited to,

African-American Criticism & Ethnic Studies
Cognitive Criticism
Ecocriticism
Existentialism & Phenomenology
Feminism & Gender Studies
Gay Criticism, Lesbian Criticism, & Queer Theory
Postcolonial Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism

During the 30-45 minute presentation followed by 10-20 minute question and answer session, the group should

Provide an overview of the method (based on Tyson's Critical Theory Today overview and/or an additional overview provided by your professor).
- Compare and contrast the method with at least 2-3 previously studied critical theories.
- Define both the theory of the method and describe the practice of the method.
- See the professor if your method is not represented in Tyson's Critical Theory Today.
Teach one or two theoretical articles by a specific theorists articles can be found in Leitch's The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism;
- One week before the presentation, inform the class of the one or two theoretical articles from Leitch's The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism that your group will teach.
- 3 member groups teach 1 theoretical article.
- 4 member groups teach 2 theoretical articles.
- See the professor if your method is not represented in Leitch'sThe Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism.
Demonstrate the method with an interpretation of either one in-class text (Condé, Lori-Parks, Moore and Bolland, Rich, Waller-Bridge, Wilder).

Parameters

Time: 30-45 minute presentation, 10-20 minute question and answer session
Format: Use any audiovisuals you wish, like a Powerpoint, Prezi, or the whiteboard.
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. Here's how to calculate your course grade.

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Exam 1

Exam 1 will cover formalism (liberal humanism, New Criticism, Russian formalism) and structuralism (semiotics, genre criticism, narratology, interpretive conventions) and will be taken in class on Tuesday, September 19. There will be two essay questions. In the first essay, you will be asked to compare and contrast the two critical theories (formalism and structuralism). 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, the short story "The Company of Wolves" by Angela Carter, the pilot episode of the television show Grimm, or the film Freeway. 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 formalist and structuralist methodologies of interpretation.

If I were to study for this exam, I would 1) create a study sheet of key terms and key ideas from both the general theories and particular theorists), 2) write practice essays comparing and contrasting two critical theories (formalism and structuralism) using those keys terms and ideas from a few of those theorists, and 3) write practice essays interpreting the one literary/filmic text from two critical perspectives using those key terms and key theorists.

Exam 2

Essay 1: Theory

Compare and contrast 1) how two generic theorists (a generic poststructuralist theorist and a generic psychoanalytic theorist), approach art, literature, and film in terms of meaning and 2) how two specific theorists (a specific poststructuralist theorist and a specific psychanalytic theorist) 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.
Your essay should cover
1. a general overview of the first theory (Postructructuralism)
2. a specific understanding of a theorist from the first theory (Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Austin, Butler, Baudrillard, or Cixous)
3. a general overview of the second theory (Psychoanalytic Criticism)
4. a specific understanding of a theorist from the second theory (Freud, Bloom, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Mulvey, or Kaplan)
5. a comparison and contrast of the two selected theories

Essay 2: Interpretation
- First, select either 1) a poem of your choice by Emily Dickinson on Poetry Foundation, 2) William H. Gass's story "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's", 3) the television series The Last of Us, or 4) Todd Field's 2022 film Tár. Second, 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 Derrida 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 poststructuralism
  - a specific interpretation of the text by defining and applying a particular poststructuralist theorist's methodology (Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Austin, Butler, Baudrillard, or Cixous; but not the same theorist as Essay 1)
  - a general interpretation of the text using psychoanalysis
  - a specific interpretation of the text defining and applying a particular psychoanalyst theorist's methodology ((Freud, Bloom, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Mulvey, or Kaplan; but not the same theorist)
  - a comparison and contrast of the interpretations
Parameters
- Due: GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Dropbox > Exam 2 on Tuesday, October 31
- 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 Historical Criticism (Marxist Criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Criticis) and your choice of any one of the group presentations theories (Reader-Response Criticism, TBA, Feminism & Gender Studies, or Postcolonial Criticism). Be sure to address both the critical theory and the interpretive practice. Your essay should cover
  1. a general overview of the Historical Criticism
  2. a specific understanding of a particular historical 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, December) 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
Parameters
- Due: GeorgiaVIEW > Course Work > Assignments > Exam 3 on Tuesday, December 12
- 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 theories, 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 20.
  - 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
Sara Bennett
Alex Churchill
Mary Morgan Collier
Adrienne Cook
Kiley Fry
Lily Gauntt
Hayley Gonzalez
Ryan McGill
Eliza Rainey
Charlize Reynolds
Savannah Schofield
Whitney Wallace
Hope Withers