E 791A: THEORIZING THE DISCIPLINE
Schedule

 
This syllabus is subject to change. The latest version on this website is the binding syllabus.

Office: Bartlett 259
Office Hours: Wed and by appointment.
545-6598 | sharris@english.umass.edu
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

W 1:00pm - 3:30pm

WEEK 8: Structuralism
22 October


"the production of new interpretations is the task of literary study" (Culler, ix). Who studies the studiers?

Consider the historicization of style, and the critic's approach to style as an archaeological phenomenon. Keep close notes of who says what!

Each critic depends upon a larger structure to make sense of the fragments of texts which appear to her in books. How is this structure defined, recognized, categorized? What does poetic language do, how does it function, within the larger semiotic system? How does language relate to cuture as a system of codes? Is a literary artifact meaningful in and of itself or only with respect to the cultural/linguisic system in which it functions?

 

 

READ

1) Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler (1981; Cornell, 2002), pp. vii-131.

Appeal to Jacobson, Bakhtin, Saussure

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1966)
 Considers contexts of self-definition in morally uncertain situations.