ENGLISH 5000: INTRODUCTION TO GRADUATE STUDY

Fall 2006 [Sec. G01, #48200]                                                                                                                                                   F. GRADY

W 7:00-9:30                                                                                                                                                                            455 LUCAS

63 University Center                                                                                                                                                             516-5592

M 2:30-4:30, W 2-4,                                                                                                                                                               fgrady@umsl.edu

            and by appointment


 

     A survey of the approaches to literary study that have flourished in the academy over the last half-century, including New Criticism, structuralism, semiotics, reception theory, marxism, feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender criticism, new historicism, and other poststructuralist modes of address.  Attention will also be paid to topics such as the nature of literary history, contemporary institutional and professional issues, and proper bibliographic and textual practice.  Though much of the reading will be theoretical, we will do our best to remain grounded through practical criticism of two primary texts, Stoker's Dracula and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath‘s Tale..

 

Course documents and assignments will be posted on mygateway.umsl.edu, but the main course page will be located at www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/5000F06SYLL.htm , which can also be reached through my home page(www.umsl.edu/~gradyf).

                                                         

     Requirements: Class participation (based on perfect attendance; regular, vigorous, and open-minded contribution to discussion; written responses to discussion questions--25%); one bibliographic project (10%); two short (5-6pp.) essays (20% each); one take-home final exam (25%).

 

REQUIRED TEXTS:

·        Richter, D. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends.  3rd edition.  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007 [hence CT]

·        Chaucer, G. The Wife of Bath.  Ed. Beidler.  Case Studies in Contemporary  Criticism.  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996 [hence WB]

·        Bram Stoker, Dracula.  Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. Norton Critical Edition. Norton, 1997 (1897)

·        M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms. Sixth edition. Harcourt  Brace Jovanich College Publishers, 1993

 

RECOMMENDED: Possession of or regular access to a style manual, either the MLA Handbook of Writers of Research Papers or The Chicago Manual of Style, and a good dictionary.

Tentative SYLLABUS:_____________________________

W AUG 23 Introduction: Readings, Research, Rumors, Regrets

_____________________________________________________

W AUG 30: Profession

Graff, “Taking Cover in Coverage” [reader]

Guillory, from Cultural Capital, CT 1472-84

Culler, Literary Theory 1-41 [reader]

Menand, “Dangers Within and Without” [reader]

Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," CT 537-541

_____________________________________________________

W SEP 6: Primary Texts

Dracula

Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

 

[Library research tour]

_____________________________________________________

W SEP 13: Psychoanalysis

Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams, “The Uncanny,” “Medusa’s Head,” CT 500-533

Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” CT 1172-80

Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in …Dracula” [reader]

Roth, "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula," in Dracula, 411-21

Holland, “Meaning as Transformation: The Wife of Bath’s Tale” [reader]

_____________________________________________________

W SEP 20: Psychoanalysis II

Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I…”, CT 1123-8

Foster, “’The little children can be bitten’: A Hunger for Dracula” [reader]

Louise O. Fradenburg, “’Fulfild of fairye’: The Social Meaning of Fantasy in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” WB 205-220

Žižek, "Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire" [reader]

_____________________________________________________

W SEP 27: Formalism & Reader-Response Criticism

Brooks, from My Credo and “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” CT 797-806

Crane, from “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks,” CT 807-10

Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," CT 810-18

Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim” [reader]

Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” CT 1022-30

Phelan, from Data, Danda and Disagreement, CT 1031-34

·        Richter, “Formalisms,” CT 749-60

_____________________________________________________

W OCT 4: Structuralism and Semiotics

Saussure, Selections from Course in General Linguistics,  CT 842-49

Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature,” CT 691-701

Barthes, "The World of Wrestling" [reader]; “Striptease,” “The Structuralist Activity,” CT 869-74

Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” CT 860-68

Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” CT 950-61

_____________________________________________________

W OCT 11: Deconstruction

Graff, "Determinacy/Indeterminacy" [reader]

Barthes, “From Work to Text,” CT 878-82

Riquelme, "Doubling and Repetition/Realism and Closure in Dracula" [reader]

H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “’My bed was ful of verray blood’: Subject, Dream, and Rape in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” WB 234-54

Martinez, “Deconstructing the Matrix” [reader]

Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” CT 915-26

F OCT 13  First Essay Due (group A)

_____________________________________________________

W OCT 18: Feminist Criticism

Gilbert and Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic, CT 1532-44

Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own, CT 596-601, 607-10

De Beauvoir, from The Second Sex, CT 673-78

Fetterly, Introduction to The Resisting Reader, CT 1035-42

Culler, “Reading as a Woman,” CT 1579-90

Showalter, from “Critical Cross-Dressing…,” CT 1591-97

 

F OCT 20  First Essay Due (group 1)

____________________________________________________

W OCT 25: Gender Studies

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “’Of his love daungerous to me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” WB 273-88

Craft, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," in Dracula 444-59 (plus on-line supplements:  part 1    part 2    part 3

Sedgwick, from Between Men, CT 1684-87

Wittig, “One Is not Born a Woman,” CT 1637-42

Butler, from Gender Trouble [reader]

_____________________________________________________

W NOV 1: Marxist Criticism

Althusser, from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, CT 1263-72

Williams, from Marxism and Literature, CT 1272-90

Moretti, "A Capital Dracula," in Dracula 431-44

Finke, “’All is for to selle’: Breeding Capital in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” WB 169-88

Grady, "Vampire Culture" [reader]

·        Richter, “Marxist Criticism,” CT 1198-1214

·        Murfin, “Marxist Criticism and the Wife of Bath,” WB 155-66

_____________________________________________________

W NOV 8: Historicism

Patterson, “’Experience woot well it is noght so’: Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” WB 133-54

Schaffer, "'A Wilde Desire Took Me': The Homoerotic History of  Dracula," Dracula 470-82 (plus on-line supplements: part 1  part 2  part 3  part 4  part 5) (full text available here))

Grady, "Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of  the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss" (reader)

Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms  and “King Lear and Harsnett’s ‘Devil-Fiction’,” CT 1443-47

Lentricchia, from Ariel and the Police, CT 1448-52

White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” CT 1383-1397

·        Murfin, “What is the New Historicism?”, WB 115-31

·        Richter, “New Historicism and Cultural Studies,” CT 1320-39 [ to 1332?]

_____________________________________________________

W NOV 15: Postcolonial Critisicm

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: GROUP 1

Appiah, "Race" [reader]

Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” CT 1837-49

Said, from Orientalism, CT 1801-14

Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of  Reverse Colonization," in Dracula 462-70

            Supplement (full text here)

Anderson, “The Origins of National Consciousness,” CT 1815-20

·        Richter, “Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies,” CT 1753-74 [to 1764]

F NOV 17 Second Essay Due (group A)

_____________________________________________________

W NOV 23  Thanksgiving Break: No Class

W NOV 23  Second Essay Due (group 1)

_____________________________________________________

W NOV 29: Cultural Studies

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: GROUP A

Fiske, “Popular Culture” [reader]

Morris, “Things to Do with Shopping Centres,” 1452-71

Clover, "Her Body/Himself" [reader]

Radway, " "The Institutional Matrix of Romance" [reader]

Bourdieu, from Distinction, CT 1398-1403

F DEC 1  Bibliographic Projects Due

 

_____________________________________________________

W DEC 6: What’s Left?

 

 

F DEC 15  Final Exams Due

                                           

 

Students with disabilities who believe that they may need accommodations in this class are encouraged to contact the Disability Access Services Office in 144 Millennium Student Center at 516-6554 as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are arranged in a timely fashion.