Special Topics

Enrollment in this seminar is limited exclusively to Comparative Literature students who will be writing an Honors Thesis during the 2011-2012 academic year. Although this seminar is optional rather than required for Comparative Literature Honors Thesis students (i.e., students who will be taking Comparative Literature CL H195  in 2011-2012, in which they will write an Honors Thesis under the direction of a faculty advisor), the seminar is nonetheless designed to help provide students with a strong background and training in what their Honors Thesis will entail.  The seminar will offer readings and discussions–and a sense of the trajectory across time and circumstance–of some of the most influential texts in literary theory, criticism, and aesthetics from Plato and Aristotle until today.  We will also attempt to apply these theoretical traditions to the actual practice of literary criticism by engaging (in short essay assignments) the various theories and methodologies we’re studying with particular literary texts that students will likely be writing about in their Honors Theses. We’ll thus likewise consider some of the nuts and bolts involved in the undertaking of the sustained critical essay of forty or more pages that the Honors Thesis represents. The theory and criticism we’ll read–and apply–will include aspects of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Neo-Classical, Enlightenment, Romantic and post-Romantic traditions, as well as more sustained engagements with modern and recent trends (including New Criticism, Reader-Response, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, New Historicism, Marxism, Feminism, and Race-, Gender-, and Sexuality-focused criticism). Our double-focus throughout the seminar will be on how literary theory and criticism have historically helped–or hindered–understandings of literature and literary/cultural works, and of how students can make literary theory and criticism help them (in terms of interpretation, methodology, and the practical tasks involved in writing a sustained critical essay) as they write their Honors Theses.