Lecture Description
Overview:
In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the origins of formalist literary criticism. Considerable attention is paid to the rise and subsequent popularity of the New Critics and their preferred site of literary exploration, the "poem." The idea of autonomous art is explored in the writings of, among others, Kant, Coleridge, and Wilde. Using the work of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the lecture concludes with an examination of acceptable categories of evidence in New Criticism.
Reading assignment:
Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 811-18
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?