Title: INTERPRETATION OF LITERARY TEXTS

PRQ:

Course Description and Requirements: This course will discuss the very latest theories in literary criticism, covering topics ranging from narrative and cognition, to evolutionary psychology and modernism. I will illustrate each theoretical model by having the class select, and then examine, a major literary text familiar to everyone in the class. By drawing on recent work in such literary journals as Style, Poetics Today, and Philosophy and Literature, and from such scholars as Lisa Zunshine, Joseph Carroll, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Jonathan Gottschall, we will survey the recent critical field during the first part of the course.

During the second half of the course, students will select whichever of these theoretical models they find most interesting and read two or three literary texts (British, American, or Russian; the whole class will agree upon; see examples below) that they wish to analyze using insights from the model. Then, either in aggregates or alone, students will write a critical essay employing the critical model to analyze one of the literary works. Classes will thus mix my lectures, whole-class debates, student reports, and regular workshop editing with the goal of each person completing a significant piece of his/her own scholarship by the end of the semester.

Sample Critical Texts, exact titles TBA:

1) Up-to-date journal essays from Style, Poetics Today, Critical Inquiry, etc.

2) Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel, Ohio State UP, 2010.

3) Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, Ohio State UP, 2006.

4) Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? Johns Hopkins, 2010.

5) Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, Palgrave, 2008.

6) Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature, SUNY P, 2011.

Sample Literary Texts; selections to be determined by class:

1) William Shakespeare, Hamlet, or Julius Caesar.

2) Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

3) Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys.

4) Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending.

5) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

6) Graham Greene, The End of the Affair.