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C LIT 401 THEORY OF LITERATURE

1 Unit            Prerequisite: Knowledge of two languages other than English or (with instructor's consent advanced knowledge of one foreign language.

 01627         Lecd A         3:00-4:50     TU            1120 FLB      N Blake

In the course of this seminar we will follow the evolution of Western philosophical and critical discourse as it attempts to encompass poetics.  Our method will include the reading of philosophical texts as literature and of poetic texts as theory.  We will also consider the deviation imposed on certain text through translation and begin to define some of the problems facing Comparatists as linked to critical method.

 

Readings:

  • Aristotle, Poetics

  • German Romanticism, extracts from Novalis, Schlegel

  • French Symbolism, Mallarme and Valery

  • American Modernism, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W.C. Williams and Ezra Pound

  • Sigmund Freud, Gravida

  • Rilke, Duino Elegies

  • Heidegger, What Are Poets For?

  • Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles"

  • Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on the Purloined Letter"

  • Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror

  • Slavoj Zlzek, The Hitchcockian Blot