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This course provides a general introduction to recent critical theory and some of its historical antecedents. It does so by surveying how the self or the subject and its relationship to the world has been theorized in modern thought. We will begin by discussing Rene Descartes’ Cogito (I think, therefore I am), one of the founding conceptions of the modern subject. Then, we will focus on how the modern idea of the self has been taken up and reimagined in subsequent schools of critical theory such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory. Finally, we will end the quarter by analyzing Clarice Lispector’s novel, The Passion According to G.H., which addresses the central questions of the course in literary form.
This course provides a general introduction to recent critical theory and some of its historical antecedents. It does so by surveying how the self or the subject and its relationship to the world has been theorized in modern thought. We will begin by discussing Rene Descartes’ Cogito (I think, therefore I am), one of the founding conceptions of the modern subject. Then, we will focus on how the modern idea of the self has been taken up and reimagined in subsequent schools of critical theory such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory. Finally, we will end the quarter by analyzing Clarice Lispector’s novel, The Passion According to G.H., which addresses the central questions of the course in literary form.
Required Texts
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Some Useful Links
Literary Theory (full text database):
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism:
http://litguide.press.jhu.edu.turing.library.northwestern.edu/
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online:
http://www.rep.routledge.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu
Introductory Guide to Critical Theory:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/
Introduction to Modern Literary Theory:
http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm
Schedule
T 1/ 5 Course Introduction
Descartes, Mediations
Th 1/ 7 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
T 1/12 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Blackboard)
Hegel, “Dialectics”
Th 1/14 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Fanon, “The Negro and Psychopathology
T 1/18 Marx, “Wage Labor” and Capital
Th1/21 Irigaray, “Women on the Market”
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby” (Blackboard)
T 1/25 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”
Sedgewick, Between Men (Blackboard)
Th1/28 Marx, “German Ideology” and Grundrisse
T 2/ 2 Gramsci, “Hegemony”
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Th 2/ 4 Said, Orientalism (Blackboard)
Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge
T 2/9 Derrida, “Differance”
Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse”
Th 2/11 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”
Halberstam, Female Masculinity
T 2/16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Blackboard)
Th 2/18 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Blackboard)
T 2/23 Mbembe, “Necropolitics” (Blackboard)
Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages”
(Blackboard)
Th 2/25 Lispector, The Passion According to G.H
T 3/ 2 Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Th 3/4 Final Test
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