Master course in Modern Literary Theory and Criticism ISPITNA PITANJA

2012

Write a concise essay (not longer than three pages) on one of the following : 1. Anglo-American New Criticism: The main representatives, chief assumptions regarding literature, its relation to author, reader, the world, its purpose, and the way these affect the choice of proper approach, ie, critical method . The similarities with and differences from Russian formalism. The arguments against New Criticism from the standpoint of structuralism (Frye), Post-structuralism (deconstruction), Marxism (Terry Eagleton). 2. Structuralism as humanism: The uses of myth in Levi-Strauss and Barthes). 3. Interpretatin of Oedipus ( a phase in psychological development, and the play) : Freud, Lacan, From. 4. Repressive society and the role of art: Compare the views of (neo)Marxist critics Trilling, Lukacs, Althusser, Marcuse, D. Suvin. 5. Repudiation (explicit or implicit) of major postmodern assumptions (refer to versions of depoliticized speech in Foucauld, Derrida, Lyotard, Sixus, Irigarey) in the works of Ravenhill, Bond, A. Rich, Helen Sheehan. 6. European literature in New Historicist and/or Postcolonial and Feminist studies: Sinfield, Said, Gilbert and Gubar. 7. Postcolonial writing as a revolutionary project: Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, Caroline Elkins (See her lecture on You Tube on the British colonial crimes in Kenya in the fifties) 8. Richards, Ransom, Sklovski, Frye, Gilbert and Gubar, Said, Bond, Marcuse: Select from among these a theory or a critic whose ideas about literature, and its relation to culture and identity you find most plausible, briefly describe them and demonstrate their usefulness in an analysis of the literary text of your choice. 9. Explain the following terms and concepts: the sublime, narratology, poetics, hermeneutics, horizon of expectations, aporia, deconstruction, jouissance.