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This seminar will survey the range of critical methodologies which produced and which have followed the so-called "linguistic turn" heralded by deconstruction. One of the seminar's goals is to examine the theoretical developments which led to that pivotal movement, with an end to clarifying its political, intellectual, and institutional stakes as well as its present-day fall-out. Another goal of the seminar is to assess the state of literary methodology in the academy today. What kinds of claims do we make for literary texts, and what kinds of warrants do we find for those claims? The seminar aims to read both closely and broadly, with the all-important goal of enhancing your own critical assurance, refining your own interpretive and literary-historical acumen, and developing your own engagements in the ongoing redefinition of what literary critics do. Methodologies covered in the seminar may include: psychoanalysis; Marxism; structuralism; post-structuralism; new historicism; feminist theory; queer theory; cultural studies; and cognitive theory. Required of all MALit students within the first year of study.
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This class will introduce students to some of the techniques, resources, and theoretical approaches for the study of literature at the graduate level. The particular field we will examine is European and American writing from the so-called "Age of Discovery." Columbus' voyages to the Americas from 1492 on did not take place in an intellectual vacuum. They only added another layer to existing assumptions and beliefs about what lay across the Atlantic, which had long been populated in the European imagination with monsters, paradises, and kingdoms. In the two centuries that followed, travel and colonization went hand in hand with imaginary projections based on these earlier beliefs. The dialectic of what its European explorers intended and the cultures and material conditions they encountered make this topic an unusually fruitful one for a variety of methodological approaches. We will seek to explore these European assumptions and reactions through extended practice in documentary and social history, poststructural, gender, and postcolonial theory, and old-fashioned close reading. Required of all students within the first year of study.
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