Literary and Cultural Theory

(4 Credits)

This course develops students' understanding of theoretical approaches that have been central to literary and cultural studies. The course considers such questions as: What is literature? What is a text? What kind of work does a literary scholar or cultural critic do? What does it mean to read literature in translation? How does language shape meaning? How do we construct meaning from a text - and why does that meaning matter? And, crucially: what is at stake in how we answer these questions? Topics to be covered include classical theories of literature and poetics (Plato, Aristotle, Bharata, Adūnīs), mimesis and representation, discourse analysis and new historicism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, reception-aesthetics and reader response, world literature theory, gender and sexuality theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, hybridity theory, posthumanism, climate theory, and cosmopolitanism. For their final papers, students will explore the work of a theorist not assigned on the syllabus.