Literary Theory

This subject examines contemporary and historical practices of literary criticism and theory. When critics write about texts or performances, what do they write about and why? How do they understand the object of critical attention? How do they understand their relation to that object? What questions do they think are worth asking of a literary work, and what questions appear as irrelevant or uninteresting? Responses to these kinds of questions have changed radically over the history of literary criticism and between different schools of critical thought. This subject will try to illuminate specific formations of critical practice. In some semesters, we might focus on specific literary theoretical problems: the theory of the novel, the theory of the lyric. In others, we might focus on different critical schools: queer theory, black studies, the Frankfurt school, psychoanalysis. Or we might focus on the work of a single thinker: Saidiya Hartman, Roland Barthes. In each instance, the goal will be to set basic questions of literary theory and performance studies in motion again.