Lecture Description
Overview:
In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores Fredric Jameson's seminal work, The Political Unconscious, as an outcropping of Marxist literary criticism and structural theory. Texts such as Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet are examined in the context of Jameson's three horizons of underlying interpretive frameworks--the political, the social, and the historical, each carefully explained. The extent to which those frameworks permeate individual thought is addressed in a discussion of Jameson's concept of the "ideologeme." The theorist's work is juxtaposed with the writings of Bakhtin and Levi-Strauss. The lecture concludes by revisiting the children's story Tony the Tow Truck, upon which Jameson's theory of literature is mapped.
Reading assignment:
Jameson, Fredric. "The Political Unconscious." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1291-1306
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?