Discussion Question Schedule English 4030: Contemporary Literary
Theory Fall
2005
Please respond to the relevant question(s) in a typed paragraph or three (let’s say at least 200-300 words, for now), and be prepared to supply/defend/argue for your reply in class.
W AUG 31 What is Literature?
Q: Why does Terry Eagleton argue that "literature" cannot be said to exist "as an 'objective,' descriptive
category"? Do you agree with his claims? If not, why not? And if you do agree, have you always held that
opinion, or is it of more recent vintage?
M SEP 12 Dracula
W SEP 14 Psychoanalysis (A-F)
Q: Define the following terms and describe their importance to Freud’s work: repression; "Oedipus complex"; id, ego, superego; condensation, displacement.
M SEP 19 Psychoanalysis (G-W)
Q: Drawing on Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women in … Dracula,” outline the differences between an “Oedipal” reading of the novel and a “pre-Oedipal” account.
W SEP 21 Some Feminisms (A-F)
Q: Today’s readings are all grouped under the heading “feminism,” but they don’t all necessarily agree about the relationship between women—real people--and “Woman,” the essential category or Platonic ideal or patriarchal myth. Describe some of the differences in approach.
OR
Q: What does it mean exactly, “One is not born a woman?”
M SEP 26 Some Feminisms, cont. (G-W)
Q: What, according to Schweickart (who borrows from Fetterly) is “immasculation”? Can you think of additional examples that might fit the definition she provides? And what exactly is to be done about it?
W SEP 28 Beyond Feminism? (A-F)
Q:
W OCT 5 Marxist Criticism II: Ideology and the
Subject
(G-W)
Q: “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,” writes Althusser (1502). What does this mean? Define Althusser’s terms and explain this statement.
M OCT 17 Against Formalism I: Reader-Response
Criticism (A-G)
Q: How can we distinguish between what Stanley Fish means when he writes in "Interpreting the Variorum" that the questions debated by Milton critics "are not meant to be solved but to be experienced," and what Cleanth Brooks means when he writes in "The Heresy of Paraphrase" that "a true poem is a simulacrum of reality. . .by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience"? Do you agree with Fish that the reading he produces are unlike those that one gets in formalist criticism?
or
What constrains interpretation and solves the problem of critical relativism for Fish? Do you find that Fish provides an adequate explanation for why literary criticism is not an "anything goes" exercise? Why or why not?
W OCT 19 Against
Formalism II: Structuralism (M-Z)
Q (pick one): Define these terms from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics: langue; parole; sign; signified; signifier; diachronic; synchronic. What does Saussure mean when he argues that "the linguistic sign is arbitrary"? Why is that considered an important insight?
or
Northrop Frye represents another voice in the discussion we've followed this semester about the aims of criticism and the nature of its literary object. Briefly (but insightfully and cogently) compare/contrast Frye's approach in "The Archetypes of Literature" with Eliot or the New Critics or Fish or someone else.
M OCT 24
Against Formalism III: Semiotics (A-L)
Q: Give it a try: following the example of Barthes, produce a brief structuralist/semiotic analysis of something--something you see on the way to school, or in the supermarket, or on television; clothing, speech, athletics, food preparation, advertising--whatever strikes your interpretive fancy (but not this class, or this assignment—and it might be best to stay away from the headlines, too). Remember to focus on signs.
W OCT 26
Against Formalism IV: Deconstruction (M-W)
Q: Define the following and explain their relevance to deconstruction: logocentrism; presence; binary opposition; indeterminacy/undecidability; différance; aporia; trace.
M OCT 31
Deconstruction in Action (A-G)
Q: Describe in detail the ways in which Riquelme’s essay (“Doubling and Repetition/Realism and Closure in Dracula” ) exemplifies the techniques or strategies associated with deconstruction.
W NOV 2 Psychoanalysis after Deconstruction:
Lacan (H-W)
Q: Lacan brings together Freud and Saussure when he claims that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Given what you know of both the unconscious (according to Freud) and the structure of language (according to Saussure), speculate about what that claim might mean.
or
Compare Slavoj Žižek's account of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories with Catherine Belsey's use of them in her "Constructing the Subject" essay.
W NOV 9 Marxism After Deconstruction, or Some
Historicisms
Q: Monday’s assignment is a little
different from the usual order of things: your job (those of you in the A-G
part of the alphabet) is to come up with two discussion questions of your own
about the reading. They should be
focused enough to give us a starting point (so, not “what does Foucault mean,
anyway?” but rather “what does Foucault mean by ‘the history of the
present’?”), but not so narrow as to close off discussion (“when was Foucault
born?”); certainly they can seek to bring two texts together (“how is the
influence of Foucault visible in Schaffer’s Dracula
essay?”). And you should be prepared to
sketch out some initial answers to the questions you propose—that is, to guide
the discussion it prompts.
Extra
brownie point to questions that arrive in my e-mailbox by