Professors Gary Handwerk and John Webster
Autumn Quarter 2009

What do we do when we do theory within (and increasingly, beyond) the fields of literary and cultural studies, inside (and increasingly, outside) an American department of English language and literature? And, having some sense of the what, how do we do it, and why? We’ll spend this quarter investigating these simple questions from three different vantage points—historical backgrounds to modernity (covering authors from Aristotle to Marx to Nietzsche to Wilde to Woolf), selected incursions into contemporary theoretical perspectives (candidates Foucault, Barthes, Robinson, Sedgwick, Gates, Buell), and a rapid survey of current research on learning. Our discipline is far past the phase when a comprehensive survey of what has come to be called “theory” was practical or possible. Such a survey is well worth undertaking, in whole or in part; we encourage to move from here into 507-10, 535, 556 or wherever your theoretical inclinations might take you next. Our aim in this class is to make those further steps more comprehensible, whether you choose to take them or not.

Theory begets practice...or perhaps the other way around. In any case, the course will also have a practical, eyes-on dimension. Each of you will spend 2 weeks visiting and observing one of the English Department undergraduate gateway courses to the major (English 301 or 302), then reporting back to the seminar with reflections on what you have seen. We’ll also have some literary texts—poems, short stories, essays—for fodder. And since practice in humanities departments means writing and teaching, we will be asking you to do significant amounts of both as well.

Required Books:

Bayard, Pierre, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read (Granta: 2008)
Crews, Frederick, The Pooh Perplex (U of Chicago P: 2003)
Richter, David, Falling into Theory, 2 ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s: 2000)
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own