Neo-Formalisms

5 credits · Graduate

Literary theory in the twenty-first century has been marked by a return to formalist modes of thinking about the text. Alternatively presented as a reaction to sociological or cultural modes of critical reading and a radical expansion of what "form" is, these so-called neo-formalist methods of interpretation have both returned us to an interest in close-reading, and surfaced alternative approaches to uncovering meaning in text. In this class, we will begin by revisiting formalist theories of the 20th century, including new criticism, structuralism, and linguistic theory before moving to interrogate recent formalist methods such as surface reading, distant reading, and cognitive scientific approaches to meaning in text.