RMS 132: Critical Theory and Critical Approaches in English Studies
60 HoursCourse Introduction:
The course will act as a survey of theories, approaches andmovements in literary studies. The emphasis should be given to help participants locatethe ideas and their emergence in specific socio-historical contexts.
Course Objectives
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To explore the various currents, pressures, and directions in contemporarycriticism as aspects of the cultural present and as an ongoing conversationwith intellectual precursors and earlier traditions of literary study.
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To enable readers to build their own sense of the map of modern literarycritical practice.
Course DescriptionModule I10 Hrs
Concepts of Criticism and Aesthetic Origins: Literature; Theory; Mimesis; Expressivity:The Romantic Theory of Authorship; Interpretation: Hermeneutics; Value: Criticisms,Canons, and Evaluation
Module II15 Hrs
Criticism and Theory up to Nineteenth Century: Ancient Greek Criticism – Plato andAristotle; The Greek and Roman traditions of Rhetoric; Neo-Platonism, St Augustine andSt Thomas Aquinas; Medieval Humanism; Neo-classical Literary Criticism; TheEnlightenment; The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics; Hegel; Romanticism inGermany, France, England and America and the colonies; Realism and Naturalism;Symbolism and Aestheticism; The Heterological Thinker – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,Bergson, Arnold.
Module III15 Hrs
Criticism and Critical Practices in the Twentieth Century: Literature and the Academy;T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition; Anthropology and/as Myth in Modern Criticism;F.R. Leavis: Criticism and Culture; Marxist Aesthetics; William Empson: From VerbalAnalysis to Cultural Criticism; The New Criticism; Intentional Fallacy; Adorno and theFrankfurt School; Freud and Psychoanalysis; The Russian Debate on Narrative; Bakhtinand the Dialogic Principle; Form, Rhetoric, and Intellectual History; Cultural Studies.
Module IV10 Hrs
Literary Theory: Movements and Schools: Formalisms; Structuralism and NarrativePoetics; Psychoanalysis after Freud; Deconstruction; Feminisms; Reader-Response andReception Theory; Postcolonialism; Historicism and New Historicism; Postmodernism;Sexualities; Science and Criticism.
Module V10 Hrs
Recent Developments
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Performing Literary interpretation; Questions of responsibilitiesof the writer; Mixing Memory and Desire; Psychoanalysis, Psychology, and Trauma
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