COMP 380
Literary and Critical Theory in the Twentieth Century Fall 2023
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 370
This is not the current course catalog

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From the rise of modern literary criticism around 1900 to the explosion of high theory in the 1980s and 1990s, the twentieth century witnessed an international flowering of new ideas about how to interpret art and literature: Russian Formalism, American New Criticism, French Structuralism and Deconstruction, and a welter of post- prefixed concepts that claim to transcend national boundaries: the poststructural, the postmodern, the postcolonial, the posthuman. What are the ideas associated with these different movements, and how are they connected? Does each represent a radical break with previous ways of reading, or do they actually build on one another and evolve in a systematic way? And given the entanglement between criticism and teaching, which are the theories that seem to define the work we do (and want to do) here at Williams? This course will focus on a very careful reading of essays representing major 20th-century critical schools (and a couple of their earlier precursors), by critics like Plato, Schiller, Shklovsky, Richards, Barthes, Derrida, de Man, Beauvoir, and Butler. Written assignments will encourage you to parse these theories carefully and apply them to the literary texts that most interest you: prose or poetry from any time and place; film, visual art, or architecture; music, new media, or digital media, etc.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 15
Class#: 1559
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: attendance and active participation, several short response assignments, final project consisting of a scripted oral presentation and a 15-page final paper
Prerequisites: at least one previous literature or theory course
Enrollment Preferences: Comparative Literature majors
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 370 Division I COMP 380 Division I
Attributes: AMST Critical and Cultural Theory Electives
ENGL Criticism Courses

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