The title refers to Freud's fateful summary of culture in Civilization and Its Discontents, though the discontents we'll be starting with were those in the study of literature when, through the dissidence of the 1960s, critical theory emerged as a major challenge to the practice of criticism and to institutional practice as well. On the academic scene the imports from continental thought were at first (and for some still) as disturbing as Japanese cars and microchips once were to the economy. But if the Japanese "bubble" burst, that's not quite true of theory, which has crossed borders and disciplines and, through the trickle-down economy of scholarship, passed into the media, popular culture, the postmodern condition and postcolonial thought, while foregrounding the quadrivium of race, class, gender, ethnicity. The effects have been felt, through debates over the canon, in the displacement of literary by cultural studies, the incertitudes of the curriculum, and in a redefinition--so far as definition is possible at all--of the limits and purposes of what we think of as literature.

If there has been through all this an opening up of cultural prospects, there has also been, with the immanence of globalization (no less 9/11), a permutation of discontents, as well as a resurgence of certain habits of mind or forms of feeling that were, in the fallout of revisionist marxism, ideologically suspect, as well as "transcendental signifiers" that were, with the incursion of deconstruction, presumably demystified. Readings will move, with maybe some preliminary material on the old New Criticism, from structuralism and deconstruction (intersecting psychoanalysis and feminist thought) through cultural materialism and the new historicism to "queer theory" and the notion of "performativity"-while reconsidering throughout, after years of critique, the claims of imagination, the poetic, and the powers of the aesthetic.