Lecture Description
Overview:
In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the semiotics movement through the work of its founding theorist, Ferdinand de Saussure. The relationship of semiotics to hermeneutics, New Criticism, and Russian formalism is considered. Key semiotic binaries--such as langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchrony and diachrony--are explored. Considerable time is spent applying semiotics theory to the example of a "red light" in a variety of semiotic contexts.
Reading assignment:
Levi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 860-68
Suggested: Barthes, Roland. "The Structuralist Activity." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 775-84
Course Index
- Introduction
- Introduction (cont.)
- Ways In and Out of the Hermeneutic Circle
- Configurative Reading
- The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork
- The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms
- Russian Formalism
- Semiotics and Structuralism
- Linguistics and Literature
- Deconstruction I
- Deconstruction II
- Freud and Fiction
- Jacques Lacan in Theory
- Influence
- The Postmodern Psyche
- The Social Permeability of Reader and Text
- The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
- The Political Unconscious
- The New Historicism
- The Classical Feminist Tradition
- African-American Criticism
- Post-Colonial Criticism
- Queer Theory and Gender Performativity
- The Institutional Construction of Literary Study
- The End of Theory?; Neo-Pragmatism
- Reflections; Who Doesn't Hate Theory Now?
Course Description
In this course, Prof. Paul H. Fry gives 26 video lectures on Theory of Literature. This is a survey of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. Lectures will provide background for the readings and explicate them where appropriate, while attempting to develop a coherent overall context that incorporates philosophical and social perspectives on the recurrent questions: what is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose?