The study of literature and culture today is vastly different from what it was forty years ago.\u00a0 In the 70s and 80s a revolution in thought took place, beginning with poststructuralism and deconstruction and followed by new historicism and a variety of other new approaches.\u00a0 Contemporary ways of approaching literature and culture are rooted the preceding wave of postructucturalism and deconstruction, and are only superficially understood without an understanding of that preceding wave.\u00a0 This course is intended to provide the necessary background. We will begin with a quick survey of the metaphysical and literary critical ideas that the structuralists were trying to \u201cdeconstruct,\u201d ideas that came to be lumped together as \u201chumanism\u201d and \u201cessentialism.\u201d\u00a0 Everybody today knows (whether implicitly or explicitly) that essentialism is wrong, but unless you know exactly what essentialism is, in all its complexity, you can\u2019t know exactly in what ways it\u2019s wrong, or understand that there are valid as well as invalid uses of essentialism (and by valid ways I don\u2019t just mean \u201cstrategic essentialism\u201d).\u00a0 That\u2019s why we\u2019ll start with the grandfather of essentialism, Aristotle.\u00a0\u00a0 After surveying the background texts, we\u2019ll turn to the beginnings of \u201csocial constructionism\u201d in the work from the 1920s of V. N. Volosinov (a member of the \u201cBakhtin circle\u201d), and then to the major figures of the structuralist revolution from the 70s and 80s.<\/p>\n