Reading Practices: An Introduction to Literary Theory

What is it to read? This course is an introduction to theories of reading that have shaped literary interpretation and definitions of literature from the early twentieth century to the present, with particular attention to the relation between “literary theory” as a discipline and the broader reading practices it engenders and from which it emerges. We will read the New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and new historicism, critical race theory and feminist critiques, and recent work in aesthetics. Topics include literariness and textuality, the reader and subjectivity, narrative, rhetoric, and the problem of representation, and "new formalism." Enrollment limited to thirty.