Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A professional seminar that provides students with a grounding in pedagogy and introduces professional aspects of English studies. Course will be graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.

COURSE DETAILS:

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."  Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941):110-111  

"The student movement of the late 1960s did not prevent higher education from becoming locked ever deeper into structures of military violence and industrial exploitation.  But it posed a challenge to the way in which the humanities had been complicit in all this; and one of the fruits of this challenge was cultural theory.  The humanities had lost their innocence; they could no longer pretend to be untainted by power.  If they wanted to stay in business, it was now vital that they paused to reflect on their own purposes and assumptions.  It is this critical self-reflection which we know as theory.  Theory of this kind comes about when we are forced into a new self-consciousness about what we are doing.  It is a symptom of the fact that we can no longer take those practices for granted.  On the contrary, those practices must now begin to take themselves as objects of their own inquiry.  There is thus always something rather navel-staring and narcissistic about theory, as anyone who has encountered a few prominent cultural theorists will be aware." Terry Eagleton, "The Rise and Fall of Theory" in Modern Criticism and Theory: 826  

Theory is no more, and certainly no less, than this ongoing "heated discussion" so beautifully described in the passage from Burke above.  What we will do in this course is to ask you to "put in your oar" and join the discussion.  But we will also keep at the forefront of our discussions Eagleton's assertion that our conversations - which he and others call theory - include a shift in focus to sustained "reflect[ion] on [our] own purposes and assumptions" and that the core of such discussions is "critical self-reflection", by which he means "self-consciousness about what we are doing."  Our focus will thus be dual - on the object of our attention, but also on our own manner of attending to the object.  

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

REQUIRED TEXTS/READINGS:
Lodge, David and Nigel Wood Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader 3rd edition (London: Pearson, 2008)