Discussion Question Schedule            English 4030: Contemporary Literary Theory                                                                                                                       Fall 2005

 

Please respond to the relevant question(s) in a typed paragraph or three (let’s say at least 200-300 words, for now), and be prepared to supply/defend/argue for your reply in class.

 

            W  AUG 31  What is Literature?

                        Q: Why does Terry Eagleton argue that "literature" cannot be said to exist "as an 'objective,' descriptive

category"? Do you agree with his claims?  If not, why not? And if you do agree, have you always held that

opinion, or is it of more recent vintage?

 

            M SEP 12  Dracula

Q: Write three sentences each on any three of the following themes in Dracula: sex & gender, class & labor, religion & superstition, technology & the supernatural, identity & difference, infection & health, home & abroad.

 

            W SEP 14  Psychoanalysis (A-F)

                        Q: Define the following terms and describe their importance to Freud’s work: repression; "Oedipus complex"; id, ego, superego; condensation, displacement.         

 

            M SEP 19  Psychoanalysis (G-W)

                        Q: Drawing on Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women in … Dracula,” outline the differences between an “Oedipal” reading of the novel and a “pre-Oedipal” account.

 

            W SEP 21 Some Feminisms (A-F)

                        Q: Today’s readings are all grouped under the heading “feminism,” but they don’t all necessarily agree about the relationship between women—real people--and “Woman,” the essential category or Platonic ideal or patriarchal myth.  Describe some of the differences in approach.

                                                                                                OR      

                        Q: What does it mean exactly, “One is not born a woman?”

 

            M SEP 26  Some Feminisms, cont. (G-W)

                        Q: What, according to Schweickart (who borrows from Fetterly) is “immasculation”?  Can you think of additional examples that might fit the definition she provides?  And what exactly is to be done about it?

 

            W SEP 28  Beyond Feminism?  (A-F)

Q: Myra Jehlen suggests gender is performance--"a cultural idea rather than a biological fact" (264).  What does she mean by this?  Can you think of some examples of gender performance—literary ones, ideally, but “real-world” ones as well--other than the one Jehlen proposes (even if you don't agree with the concept)?

 

                          W OCT 5  Marxist Criticism II: Ideology and the Subject (G-W)

                        Q: “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,” writes Althusser (1502).  What does this mean?  Define Althusser’s terms and explain this statement.

OCT 17  Against Formalism I: Reader-Response Criticism (A-G)

Q: How can we distinguish between what Stanley Fish means when he writes in "Interpreting the Variorum" that the questions debated by Milton critics "are not meant to be solved but to be experienced," and what Cleanth Brooks means when he writes in "The Heresy of Paraphrase" that "a true poem is a simulacrum of reality. . .by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience"? Do you agree with Fish that the reading he produces are unlike those that one gets in formalist criticism?

                                                or

What constrains interpretation and solves the problem of critical relativism for Fish? Do you find that Fish provides an adequate explanation for why literary criticism is not an "anything goes" exercise? Why or why not?