CPLT 302W-1 Course Instructor: Prof.

Sean Meighoo
Literary Theory Office Hours: By appointment only
Fall 2022 Office Location: Callaway Center S-403
Course Schedule: MonWed 2:30-3:45pm Email: sean.meighoo@emory.edu
Room Location: Callaway Center S-109 Tel: (404) 727-8806

Content

This course will focus on some of the most significant intellectual movements in literary theory
and cultural criticism from the early twentieth century to the present: Formalism, the Bakhtin
Circle, the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, Poststructuralism,
Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Black Literary Theory, Queer Theory, Disability Studies, and
Animal Studies. Although our class discussions and written assignments will be based on our
assigned course readings, we may also draw from literature and other cultural forms beyond our
readings in order to illustrate these different and sometimes conflicting theoretical approaches.

In this course, not only will students learn about these different approaches to literature and
culture and their relationship with one another, but they will also learn how to read theoretical
texts and write scholarly papers. This course fulfills one of the five core course requirements for
both the Major and Minor Degrees in Comparative Literature as well as the General Education
Requirement (GER) in Continuing Writing (WRT) for Emory College.

Texts

All assigned readings will be made available in electronic format. Please use the following link
to access Course Reserves: https://libraries.emory.edu/using-the-library/course-reserves.html.

Assessment

Final course grades will be based on the following assignments and activities:

• Response paper #1 (2-3 pp., due Fri Sep 23, 10%);

• Response paper #2 (2-3 pp., due Fri Oct 14, 10%);
• Response paper #3 (2-3 pp., due Fri Nov 4, 10%);
• Response paper #4 (2-3 pp., due Fri Nov 18, 10%);
• Long essay (8-10 pp., due Mon Dec 12, 40%);
• Attendance and participation (20%).

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Response Papers

Students are to submit four (4) papers in response to our assigned readings over the duration of
the semester (see Assessment and/or Class Schedule for due dates). Each response paper is to be
2-3 pages (500-750 words) in length. In your response paper, you are to conduct a critical
analysis of the text or texts under consideration. You are to approach your paper as a short
scholarly essay, not simply as a personal reflection. No research is required beyond our assigned
readings.

Response papers must be submitted electronically on Canvas by 1:00pm on the assigned due
dates in either Word or PDF format. Late submissions will not be accepted. Each response
paper is worth 10% of the final grade for this course.

Please consult the following Emory Libraries webpage for guidelines on citing your sources:
http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/citing_your_sources. You may use either MLA Format or
Chicago Style to cite your sources.

Long Essay

Students are to submit a long essay on a topic of their choice, as long as it is related to the issues
that we have discussed in our course. Students may choose to present a critical analysis of one
or more scholarly texts from our assigned course readings, a critical analysis of one or more
scholarly texts from outside our course, or a critical analysis of other cultural forms (including
but not limited to literary fiction and nonfiction texts, visual and plastic artworks, films and
television shows, and musical and performance pieces).

The long essay is to be 8-10 pages (2000-2500 words) in length and submitted electronically on
Canvas by 1:00pm on Monday, December 12 in either Word or PDF format. The long essay is
worth 40% of the final grade for this course.

Please consult the following Emory Libraries webpage for guidelines on citing your sources:
http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/citing_your_sources. You may use either MLA Format or
Chicago Style to cite your sources.

Attendance and Participation

Students will prepare for each class by completing the assigned readings and sharing a question
with the rest of the class during our discussion. All phones are to be turned off and earbuds put
away before entering the classroom. Students who arrive to class late or leave class early are
expected to enter and exit the classroom as inconspicuously as possible. Please notify the course
instructor in advance if you know that you will be arriving late or leaving early. Students who
arrive late or leave early without sufficient reason will not receive full credit for attendance.

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Class Schedule

Week 1. Introduction
Wed Aug 24 No assigned readings

Week 2. Aesthetics / Linguistics

Mon Aug 29 Benedetto Croce, from Breviary of Aesthetics (1913)
Wed Aug 31 Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics (1916),
Introduction, Chs. 1-4; Pt. I, Ch. 1 (pp. 1-20; 65-70)

Week 3. Linguistics (cont’d)

Mon Sep 5 Labor Day (no classes)
Wed Sep 7 Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics, Pt. I, Chs. 2-3; Pt. II, Chs.
1-4 (pp. 71-122)

Week 4. Formalism
Mon Sep 12 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device” (1917, rev. 1925)
Wed Sep 14 Vladimir Propp, from Morphology of the Folktale (1928)
Further reading: Shklovsky, Theory of Prose; Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian
Formalist Criticism.

Week 5. The Bakhtin Circle

Mon Sep 19 V.N. Vološinov, from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929)
Wed Sep 21 Mikhail Bakhtin, from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929, rev.
1963)
Further reading: Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; P.N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship.

Fri Sep 23 Response paper #1 due

Week 6. The Frankfurt School

Mon Sep 26 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936)
Wed Sep 28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, from Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1947)
Further reading: Benjamin, Illuminations; Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics.

Week 7. Structuralism
Mon Oct 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in
Anthropology” (1945)
Wed Oct 5 Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language” (1958)
Further reading: Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology; Benveniste, Problems in General
Linguistics; Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning.

Week 8. Semiotics
Mon Oct 10 Fall Break (no classes)

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Wed Oct 12 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968)
A.J. Greimas and François Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic
Constraints” (1968)
Further reading: Barthes, The Rustle of Language; Greimas, On Meaning; Umberto Eco, The
Open Work.

Fri Oct 14 Response paper #2 due

Week 9. Psychoanalysis
Mon Oct 17 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason
Since Freud” (1957, rev. 1966)
Wed Oct 19 Louis Althusser, from Reading Capital (1965)
Further reading: Lacan, Écrits; Althusser, For Marx.

Week 10. Poststructuralism

Mon Oct 24 Michel Foucault, from The Order of Things (1966)
Wed Oct 26 Jacques Derrida, from Of Grammatology (1967)
Further reading: Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; Derrida, Writing and Difference;
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

Week 11. Feminism

Mon Oct 31 Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1974, rev. 1977)
Wed Nov 2 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975, rev. 1976)
Further reading: Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman; Cixous and Catherine Clément, The
Newly Born Woman; Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time.”

Fri Nov 4 Response paper #3 due

Week 12. Postcolonial Theory

Mon Nov 7 Edward W. Said, from Orientalism (1978)
Wed Nov 9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)
Further reading: Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic; Spivak, In Other Worlds; Homi K.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

Week 13. Black Literary Theory

Mon Nov 14 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the
Sign and the Signifying Monkey” (1983)
Wed Nov 16 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book” (1987)
Further reading: Gates, Figures in Black; Spillers, Black, White, and In Color; Houston A.
Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature.

Fri Nov 18 Response paper #4 due

Week 14. Queer Theory

Mon Nov 21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

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Wed Nov 23 Thanksgiving Recess (no classes)
Further reading: Sedgwick, Between Men; Butler, Bodies That Matter; Gayle S. Rubin,
Deviations.

Week 15. Queer Theory (cont’d) / Disability Studies

Mon Nov 28 Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble (1990)
Wed Nov 30 Lennard J. Davis, from Enforcing Normalcy (1995)
Further reading: Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader; Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
Extraordinary Bodies.

Week 16. Animal Studies

Mon Dec 5 Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology,
Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s
Silence of the Lambs” (1995)
Further reading: Wolfe, Animal Rites.

Mon Dec 12 Long essay due

End of syllabus.