This is a course on modern criticism from Kant up to the point immediately preceding the onset of structuralism and post-structuralism. We will spend the first three weeks of the term on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (known informally as the ‘Third Critique’), which is universally considered the beginning of modern aesthetics and is an extremely difficult read. I will order the Cambridge edition of the Third Critique; the rest of our readings will be taken from Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams. This is a big, very expensive book, but it is an invaluable work of reference, containing many of the essential texts in critical theory from over two millennia.

Preliminary reading list:
Schiller, from Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Baudelaire, from The Salon of 1859
Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy and Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense
Mallarme, selections
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method”
Trotsky, “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism”
Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”
Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"
Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase and Irony as a Principle of Structure"

I will ask for two short papers during the quarter, with an 8-10 page final paper.