Graduate Office - Literature and Criticism Course Offerings By Semester

Course schedules are subject to change.  Please see Cathy Renwick for more information.

FALL 2005

ENGL 751 History and Theory of Criticism

Dr. David Downing

Tuesday 6:00-9:00

(Ph.D. students only)

This course will be not so much a history of ideas as an exploration of those significant cultural conflicts which have produced the society, the disciplines, and the vocabulary with which we describe ourselves and our literature.  After a brief look at some recent contributions to the status of history and theory in literature departments, we will turn to Plato and ancient Greece.  My assumption is that the cultural revolution inaugurated by the shift from oral to literate culture shaped what we call "Western metaphysics," and that this catch-all phrase suggests the extent to which the issues of representation, mimesis, reason, rhetoric, imagination, objective and subjective still have a bearing on the way we read and interpret the world.

We will then shift to the cultural revolution that took place during the Romantic period leading up to Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin.  We will then turn to what I call Cultural Turn 3, the contemporary moment, where students will then have the opportunity to explore the impact of the course on the contemporary teaching, research, and working conditions in English departments in the United States.  Students can expect to emerge with a sense of the many ways that history, theory, and teaching impact on each other.

Students will be given a variety of options for writing assignments; collaborative projects, group work, and study groups will also be encouraged.  We will also be using online computer conferences to exchange ideas and announcements.  Class participation will, of course, be a vital part of the seminar.  Texts to be used include: The Republic and Phaedrus, by Plato, the Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, Selected Writings by Karl Marx, The Portable Nietzsche, The University in Ruins, by Bill Readings, The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes, Beyond English, Inc., edited by Claude M. Hurlbert, Paula Mathieu, and myself, the recent Works and Days issue, and selected essays to be put on reserve or reproduced on xerox.

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