ENGLISH 5000 SPRING 2014 SECOND
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
Due date: as per established schedule; trades permitted.
Group
1 (due date Fri Apr 18): Hirsch, Hunt, Huskey, Kuenzle,
Primeau, Remelius
Group
A (due date Fri Apr 25): Brooks, Bennett, Huang, Johnson, Storm
Length:
1800-2200 words,
give or take, should be sufficient. Please supply a one-paragraph description of your topic by the Monday before your
essay is due, in which you make a clear statement of your aims (insofar as you
understand them at that point). Feel free to discuss possibilities with me any
time; email in particular would guarantee a prompt reply.
Topic:
One
conventional strategy in New Historicist criticism is the juxtaposition of a
literary text with contemporary, non-literary ones: such critics read
Shakespeare’s plays and explorers’ accounts of the New World, for example, or
(as we’ll shortly see) Dracula along
with contemporary accounts of Oscar Wilde's trial and Bram Stoker's own letters. The goal is not to establish firm
distinctions between “text” and “context,” but to explore the mutual, even
dialectical, involvement of multiple kinds of writing in pressing contemporary
issues and cultural entanglements.
What happens
if we place Terry Eagleton's Literary
Theory (1st ed., 1983) and David Lodge's Small World (1984) in similar relation? That is, what would reading these texts
together, as contemporary "interventions" in the debate about theory,
tell us about that debate as it stood in
the
early 1980s? Does Lodge's narrative bear
out any of the claims Eagleton makes about "theory" as a practice and an institution? Does Eagleton’s expository account of theory
hint at or draw upon the kind of libidinal investments we see in Lodge’s
characters? Eagleton and Lodge are both
prominent British academics (and were in 1984)--what attitudes or conclusions
do they share (about theory, America, the history of criticism, the nature of
"literature")? Where and how
do they differ--and can those differences be explained
in terms of the theories that the books themselves
describe?
In approaching these texts together,
and organizing an essay about them, it will certainly help to have a focus
somewhat narrower than “theory in general.”
A non-exhaustive list of possibilities would include:
·
The rhetoric of crisis (or other
rhetorical strategies)
·
The role/treatment of feminism
(and/or Marxism)
·
Theories
of narrative / theory as narrative
·
Theory
and romance (repetition, deferral, combat)
·
Theory
and mastery
·
Theory
and sterility/fecundity
·
Theory
and the “real world”
·
The
role of the theoretical commitments of the two authors
·
Visions
of the future