Introduction to Literary Criticism

English 300 Summer 2005

Professor Crosswhite

W 1-4pm drop-in hours

M, T 1-3pm by appointment (first 3 weeks)

258 PLC

346-3956

jcross@darkwing.uoregon.edu

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jcross/IntroLitCrit.htm

This course offers an introduction to literary criticism by way of four different avenues: (1) It explores a few of the classic texts from the history of literary criticism and theory; (2) it introduces seven different literary-critical approaches, with examples of each type; (3) it develops questions concerning the relation of scholarly literary criticism to the more ordinary ways people talk and write about literature and art; (4) it examines several exemplars of great literary criticism.

Texts (in UO Bookstore)

Contexts for Criticism by Donald Keesey (4^th Edition)

A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams (8th Edition)

Try to View:

The film: Adam’s Rib (1949) before July 12

Try to Read:

Shakespeare: The Tempest before July 6

Online Resources

Plato’s Dialogues: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/plato.html

http://plato-dialogues.org/links.htm

http://graduate.gradsch.uga.edu/archive/Plato1.html

http://www.classicallibrary.org/plato/dialogues/

Aristotle’s Poetics

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/aristotle.html

http://www.classicallibrary.org/aristotle/poetics/index.htm

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html

E-Reserves (Knight Library)

Other readings without page numbers will be put on E-reserve or Regular Reserve.

Readings must be completed by class time on the date assigned on syllabus.

Schedule

June

20 Introductions. (1) Why criticism? (2) The seven approaches. (3) The

exemplars. (4) Introduction to the reading of Plato.

21 Plato: Phaedrus (See Online Resources).

22 Plato: Republic II, III, VII, X (See appendix to syllabus and Online Resources),

23 Aristotle, Poetics (See Online Resources).

June 27 Historical: (Keesey 9-16)

Keesey (17-28) E.D. Hirsch: “Objective Interpretation”

Keesey (47-57) Allen C. Austin: “Toward Resolving Keats’s Grecian Urn Ode.”

28 Formal (Keesey 75-83)

Keesey (84-91) Cleanth Brooks: “Irony as a Principle of Structure”

Keesey (112-115) David A. Kent: “On the Third Stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian

Urn’”

29 Reception/Reader-Response (Keesey 129-139)

Keesey (140-147) Wolfgang Iser: “Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader”

Keesey (172-184) Douglas B. Wilson: “Reading the Urn: Death in Keats’s Arcadia”

30 Mimetic (Keesey 205-214)

Gadamer (E-reserves) “Poetry and Mimesis” and “On the Contribution of Poetry to the

Search for Truth”

Keesey (244-248) Eva Brann: “Pictures in Poetry: Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”

Final Paper Questions Distributed

Monday July 4 Holiday

Tuesday July 5 Intertextual (265-278)

Keesey (279-287) Northrop Frye: “The Critical Path”

Keesey (306-309) Lore Metzger: “Silence and Slow Time:Pastoral Topoi in Keats’s Ode”

Poststructural (Keesey 341-352)

Keesey (364-373) Paul de Man: “Semiology and Rhetoric”

Keesey (384-391) Barbara Jones Guetti: “Resisting the Aesthetic”

6 New Historical (409-418)

Keesey (427-435) Catherine Belsey: “Literature, History, Politics”

Keesey (442-451) Francis Barker and Peter Hulme: “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily

Vanish: The Discursive Contexts of The Tempest.”

7 Exemplars: Sharon Cameron: “The Subject of Context” from Choosing not Choosing:

Dickinson’s Fascicles (E-Reserves).

11 Exemplars: Yvor Winters: “Foreword” and “The Morality of Poetry” from In Defense

of Reason, and Edward Said: “Introduction” to Culture and Imperialism.

12 Stanley Cavell: “Words for a Conversation” and “The Courting of Marriage: Adam’s

Rib,” from Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.

Notebooks due.

July 15 Friday Final Papers due by 5pm.

Requirements and Grading

1. Papers

One P/NP paper (3 pages/800 words). This paper must be completed with a “P” for the writer to receive a passing grade in the course. Late papers will lower the final grade .1 for each day late.

One final paper, consisting of two essays (10-12 pages total), which will be 100% of the grade.

The final paper is due by 5pm, Friday, July 15.

Late final papers will NOT be accepted.

2. Questions.

For each reading assignment (for each essay we read, excluding Keesey’s introductions), write one paragraph that asks and attempts to answer a question you have about that reading. Keep these questions in a notebook, and bring them to class with you each day. You may miss one written question without penalty. Each additional missing question subtracts .1 from your final grade. As the course develops, I may assign specific short-writing assignments in lieu of these questions. If I do, they will take the place of the daily questions, and will be evaluated in the same way.

I will call on you in class to read these questions aloud, and they will serve as the springboards for our discussions. If I call on you, and you are unprepared, .1 will be deducted from your final grade.

3. Participation may raise final grade up to one-third of a grade (.33 on a 4-point scale).

Course policies

Attendance is required. One absence does not lower grade. Two absences lowers final grade .25. Three absences lowers final grade .50. Four absences lowers final grade one full point. Five absences two full points. Six absences three full points. Seven absences result in a failing grade.

Accommodations: If you need accommodations, please let me know as soon as possible and at least during the first week of classes.

Plagiarism or cheating of any kind will result in a failing grade.

Assignment for Plato’s Republic (Wednesday, June 22)

Plato: for Book 2 of the Republic, begin about 3/4 of the way through Bk. 2 with the passage that begins:

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

By all means.

Continue from there to the end of Book 2.

For Book 3: read from beginning to this passage, about half way through:

And the fairest is also the loveliest?

That may be assumed.

And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in love with the loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious soul?

That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul; but if there be any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it, and will love all the same.

For Book 7: Read from the beginning to this passage:

And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?

Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.

For Book 10: begin at the beginning.

End at this passage, just after halfway through the Book.

Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.

Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will anyone be profited if under the influence of honor or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?

Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that anyone else would have been.