This seminar traces literary theory from psychoanalytically and linguistically inflected forms of cultural criticism to more contemporary theories of literature and culture. Following a general trajectory from theorists emphasizing a symbolic realm determined by language to the focus on an analytic of aesthetic practices, the seminar thus covers major tenets in theory that have been relevant for decades. If structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural studies and discourse analysis, as well as psychoanalysis and deconstruction have continued to revolve around the intricacies of meaning-making, modeled after language-based complexities, the late twentieth-century, millennial, and postmillennial trends in theory seem to focus on the felt, the lived, the affective, the sincere, the ecological, and, thus, the material: in other words, the sensible. And yet, the seminar questions to what extent the realm of the symbolic presupposes that of the sensible, and vice versa.
The participants of this seminar will examine how recent types of theory have revised, ridiculed, and dismissed – but also, at times, worshipped, embraced, and returned to – the concepts that were constitutive of literary studies qua cultural studies: gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, as well as class and sociality. While reading generative texts by (post)structuralists including Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, the participants will examine especially the more recent theoretical frameworks officered by Brian Massumi, Jacques Rancière, Catherine Malabou, Fred Moten, Jane Bennett, and others. How may literature and culture be read differently, in the light of these frameworks?
Students must have purchased and started reading Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by April 10. The majority of the texts to be discussed, however, will be made available digitally, after the introductory session.