Foundations of Theory in the Arts and Humanities
This survey of literary theory and criticism introduces students to some of the most important genealogies of cultural, aesthetic, and political thought since antiquity. By developing tools to analyze the ineffable “products” of culture—such as race, desire, power, fantasy, and ideology—theory helps us navigate our cultural landscape. To that end, we will explore psychoanalysis, structuralism, postcolonial criticism, black studies, queer theory, and other theoretical movements that have transformed how we interpret the world. Throughout the course, we will remain mindful of how urgent questions of race, gender, class, and geopolitics are not to be treated separately from theory and criticism, but are instead embedded in aesthetic, cultural, and social thought from the outset. In other words, rather than treating movements like feminism or postcolonial criticism as though they exist in a vacuum, we will consider how race, gender, class, etc. have always informed theory.
SASAH 2240F
Professor Jeremy Arnott
Corpus Sans Corpus: Jouaissance, Phallocentrism, and Smarginatura in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
Adorno, Horkheimer, and Žižek: An Interplay on Ideological Enlightenment
Performing Resistance: Freud and Cabaret
By Fiona McAllister
By Hannah Teicher
From Opium to Superman: Marx, Nietzsche, and the Limits of Human Agency
By Karen Wen
By Myles MacPherson