Khawaja Fareed University of Engineering &

Information Technology Rahim Yar Khan

16 weeks plan of BS English 5thSemester

Literary Theory ENGL-3114

Time Course Content
period
Week 1  Defining Literary Criticism, Theory and Literature
 What is a text?
 Who is a critic and what is literary criticism?
Week 2  What is literary theory?
 How to read and interpret texts
 The purpose of literary theory
 How to extract multiple, but cogent meanings, from a single text
Week 3  Tracing the Evolution of Literary Theory and Criticism
 Plato to Plotinus
 Dante Alighieri to Boccaccio
 Sidney to Henry James
 Bakhtin and modern literary criticism
Week 4  Russian Formalism and New Criticism
 Russian Formalism: Development and Key terms
 The application of Russian Formalism on a literary text
 Differences between Russian Formalism and New Criticism
 Major tenets and methods
 Critiques of Russian Formalism and New Criticism
Week 5  Reader-Oriented Criticism
 Development
 Major ideas and methods
 Critiques of Reader-Oriented Criticism
Week 6  Structuralism
 Understanding Modernity and Modernism
 The Development of Structuralism
 Assumptions (The structure of language, langue and parole,
 Saussure’s definition of a word, narratology and its types,
Week 7  Mythemes, binary opposition, narrative functions as propounded by Propp,
Campbell, etc)
 Methodologies of Structuralism
 Applications on different literary texts
 Critiques of structuralism
Week 8  Deconstruction
  Movement from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
 The development of Deconstruction
 Major assumptions (Transcendental signified, logocentrism, binary
oppositions,
 the Derridean argument of
 phonocentrism as propounded in Of Grammatology , Metaphysics of Presence,
Arché Writing, Supplemtation and
 Deifferánce)

Week 9  Application of deconstructive theory on literary texts

 Developments in Deconstructive theory: Deleuze and Guattari and the concept
of the rhizome
 Critiques of deconstruction
Week 10  Psychoanalysis
 The development of psychoanalytic criticism
 Sigmund Freud and his basic terminology, including id, ego, superego, Models
of the human psyche, neurosis, cathexes,
 Freudian slips, Oedipus and Electra complexes (infantile stage, phallic stage,
castration complex, pleasure principle)
 Northrop Frye and archetypal criticism
 Lacan and the major concepts of the imaginary order and the mirror stage, the
Ideal-I, objet petit á, symbolic order, the
 real order
 Methodologies
Week 11  Feminism
 Historical development
 The First Second and Third Waves of Feminism: VirginiaWoolf, Simone de
Beauvoire, Showalter, Kate Millett, Betty
 Friedan. Elaine Showalter, Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Butler)
 French Feminism (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous)
 Third World Feminism (Gayatri Spivak, Sara Suleri, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, etc) and its relation with the contemporarysocio-political scenario
Week 12  Marxism
 Development of Marxism
 Major Marxist theorists (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, George Lukács, Antonio
Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton)
 Key terms: dialectical materialism, base, superstructure, interpellation, false
consciousness, proletariat, relations with
 the market, hegemony, Ideological State Apparatus, political unconscious
 Assumptions
 Methods
Week 13  Cultural Poetics or New Historicism
 Differences between Old Historicism and New Historicism
 The development of New Historicism
  Cultural Materialism
 Major assumptions
 Major theorists (Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz)
 Major terminology (discourse, poetics of culture, interdiscursivity, irruption,
etc)
Week 14  Postcolonialism
 Colonialism and Postcolonialism: Historical Dvelopment
 Major assumptions
 Major theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz
 Fanon, Edward Said, Aijaz Ahmed, Sarah Ahmed, Talal Asad, and any other of
the teacher’s choice)

Week 15  Key concepts and binaries, such as hegemony, center/periphery, Us/Other,

marginalization, double voicedness,
 Third Space, liminality, hybridity, assimilation, ecological mimeticism, the
minoritization of the English language through code-switching and code-
mixing etc.
 Postcolonial theory and the diasporic experience
 Critiques of post colonialism
Week 16  Ecocriticism