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.

Lecd A 1-2:20 TuTh
1126 FLB
A Ueda

In this course, we will inquire into the development of philosophical and critical discourse that revolves around the epic and the novel.  Such inquiry will inevitably intersect with issues of literary history and historiography, and our readings will reflect such complex paradigm by which our discipline is configured.   Methodologically, whether we read theoretical or literary works, we will engage with them as narratives, resisting the hierarchy often instituted between theory and literary practice.  We will also examine the problems of translation and how that shapes our endeavors as comparatists, defining some of the problems we face today.

Readings include selections from: Plato, The Republic, Aristotle, Poetics, Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations II, James, The Art of Fiction, Marx, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Luckacs, The Theory of the Novel, Benjamin, Illuminations, Auerbach, Mimesis, Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, Foucault, The Order of Things, Bakhtin, The Dialogic of Imagination, De Man, The Allegories of Reading and Blindness and Insight.