Gregg Lambert's Recent Courses

Spring 2005

ENG 641: Theory & Modernity

For the second course offered in the sequence of seminars in Critical Theory we will survey the different determinations of schism, or “rupture,” that have frequented the theoretical and cultural criticism on the subject of modernity. We will ask in what way the force of the concept of modernity understood as “a break with the past” or as a “state of exception” follows from an early determination of modernist aesthetic culture as expressing a temporality of “perpetual revolt.” We will also explore how this politicization of cultural expression leads to the emergence of several postmodern theoretical traditions, with their emphasis on discontinuity in historical and literary narratives, as privileged sites of resistance, critique, or what Jean-Luc Nancy has called “negative community.” At the same time, we will review the major theoretical debates that currently surround the emphasis upon the themes of discontinuity and/or continuity in the historical, political, and cultural representations of modern and postmodern. In taking up these questions we will pay particular attention to the ways in which various theories of modernity have been shaped by the social and political variables that belong to its different cultural receptions in Europe, Latin-America, and the United States. Primary theoretical texts will be selected from works by Theodore Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Yury Lotman, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Octavio Paz, and Raymond Williams. In addition to the discussion of these different authors, the class will read the novels Cobra and Concierto Barroco by Cuban novelists Severo Sarduy and Alejo Carpentier, as well as view and analyze the film Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance). Written assignments will consist of a 15-20 page draft of a seminar paper that can be later used for the purposes of the dossier (MA students only), or a 20 minute presentation and draft of a potential conference paper (PhD students).

Fall 2003

ENG 700: Robinson Crusoe and the Ethnography of the Stranger

Earlier in the century, Spanish literary historian and aesthetic critic Eugenio d’Ors wrote that the story of Robinson Crusoe is one of the primary unexamined myths belonging to modern European consciousness. Taking d’Ors statement as our thesis, this course will perform a comparative examination of the “Robinson myth” which has surfaced in modern literature and culture. As the title of the seminar indicates, rather than framing our investigation in terms of a literary history of the Robinson tradition, or 17th and 18th century castaway literature, we will use the postmodern and post-colonial “palimpsests” (using Gerard Genette’s term) of Defoe’s original novel to construct a literary anthropology of ‘the culture of the Stranger.’ After reading and discussing Michel Tournier’s Friday (Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique), and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, we will then return to examine Defoe’s novel in light of its subsequent cultural, ideological, historical, and literary revisions. Through this comparative textualization of the novel’s central fabula, the ‘island’ of Crusoe will emerge as a site where “constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view” (Clifford). During the first several weeks of the seminar I will introduce several fundamental concepts of Indo-European institutions through the writings of Benveniste, Diderot, Herder, Hume and Kant. These concepts will provide the basis for our reading and interpretation of the novels and will include the following: the ethical-juridical determination of Indo-European “laws of hospitality”; domestic economies in colonial and post-colonial fiction (or, “whose the master of the house”?); the phenomenological determination of solitude in terms of racial sovereignty, and sexual identity, and the of conversion narratives; finally, the problem of allegory in historical description (or literature, ideology, and the ethnography of the stranger). We will also examine some of the recent debates concerning the incorporation of ethnographic questions in the study of Western literature by examining the theories of literary critic Mary Louise Pratt on the genre of European travel narratives; historian Anthony Pagden on European ideology and ‘the new world’ and; anthropologist James Clifford and theorist Michel de Certeau on “traveling theories” and modern ethnography.

ETS 471: Conspiracy and Totality

(no description)

Spring 2003

ETS 315: Introduction to Contemporary Native American Novel

This course introduces the student to the developments in the contemporary literature, particularly the novel, written by Native American authors. Our focus will be the study of contemporary literary narrative against the background of historical and political questions that have surfaced in Native American communities, and in American society at large, since the 1970s. Major authors and works we will study include Peter Mattheissen’s Spirit of Crazy Horse and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman and Greg Sarris’ writings on Native American auto-biography; Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and her collection of poetry Baptism of Desire, Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Gerald Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in China, and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer. The first part of the course consists of an intensive review of historical background leading up to the events of “Wounded Knee II,” the formation of the American Indian Movement, and the arrest and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, a case which has caught the attention of mainstream American society and is the subject of Michael Apted’s documentary, “Incident at Oglala” (produced by Robert Redford), and is featured in Peter Mattheissen’s Spirit of Crazy Horse. The focus of the second part of the course will be the literature, specifically the novel by Native American writers, that emerged in U.S. national culture from the 1970’s onward, often in the context of a growing interest in Native American identity and culture, and against the background of the wholesale appropriation of Native American culture, religion, and “spirituality” associated with the New Age movements of this period. Our primary focus, therefore, will be on specific constructions and issues concerning narrative, narrative voice, and story that have been invented by these writers to adjust the form of the novel itself (a narrative vehicle that has clear colonial origins in this context) to Native American lives. Consequently, this is not a course on the culture and identity of Native American peoples, although these will certainly be issues that we take up in our examination of the literary forms by the writers we study this semester.

ETS 241: Literary Knowledge

In this course we will review the emergence of "the reader" as a distinct critical personage in the Anglo-American and Continental criticism of the 70's and early 80's. Theoretical and critical texts will include those by Barthes, De Man, Derrida, Fetterly, Fish, Graff, Pratt, Said and others. In our discussion of these texts, we will pay particular attention the relationship between the literary text, private experience, and public identity; and to the emergence of new configurations between private and public forms of sociological activity that the position of the modern literary reader has come to exemplify. The guiding questions for this course are the following: What form of knowledge is "literary knowledge" (as opposed to other modes of discursive knowledge)? How does literature present or embody "a form of knowing" that must be distinguished from intuition or from an understanding arrived at through concepts? What is the role of the reader in this form? In constructing our responses to these questions, we will explore in what ways modern constructions of "literary knowledge" concern the position and the role that is performed by the reader in both a social (i.e. institutional) and performative sense. We will also investigate why the figure of the reader and of the activity of reading have become increasingly prevalent in post-modern epistemologies that have assigned them a crucial function in the transformation of the literary experience into forms of social and political knowledge (i.e. cultural, ideological, etc.). The student should come away from this course with a very good understanding of recent American intellectual history in the fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as the various major debates and theoretical positions that have shaped the current discourses that represent these fields today.

Fall 2002

ENG 825: Analytics of Desire

In the last seminar (ENG 825: "Analytics of the Unconscious," Fall 2000), we undertook an exploration of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, primarily from the perspective of the writings of Freud and Lacan. In this seminar we will explore the theoretical genealogy of the concept of desire primarily within the philosophical tradition that follows from the philosophy of Hegel. One of the goals of the seminar will be to resolve the following paradox: if, according to Hegel, “self-consciousness is Desire in general,” how is it that most contemporary philosophies of desire determine the subject’s relation to desire as, in some sense, unconscious? One of the solutions to this problem would be to observe that in modern theories of the subject the primary agency of self-consciousness is referred to “another scene” than consciousness, such as in theories of ideology (particularly around the concept of hegemony) and, of course, in psychoanalytic theory. As a result, Hegel’s earlier formulation should be revised to read as follows: “the unconscious is desire in general, while self-consciousness is merely alienated desire (as illustrated in Lacan’s original statement that “man’s desire is the desire of the Other”). In order to resolve this apparent inversion, we will closely examine Hegel’s philosophy of desire while, at least early on, avoiding later conceptions of desire influenced by psychoanalysis and contemporary French theory. To assist in this, I have drawn on the commentaries of Alexander Kojève and the contemporary neo-Hegelian Judith Butler, whose own avoidance of the psychoanalytic theory of desire has become especially pronounced in more recent works. At the mid-term, we will turn our attention to three case studies focusing on the classical dramas of Antigone, and Seneca’s and Racine’s versions of Phaedra (which also happen to cross Greek, Roman, and Early-Modern periods). The final half of the seminar will be devoted to the works that belong to the post-Hegelian tradition in continental philosophy, specifically Kierkegaard and Sartre. I have chosen to focus on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness during the last part of the seminar, not only due to the pertinence of this study for our theme, but because Sartre’s philosophy is the absent mediator between Hegelian philosophy and most of the French theory that is well known to us today (by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc.), which has been characterized as belonging to a “generalized anti-Hegelianism.” If Sartre constitutes something of a “black hole” in the contemporary orbit of theoretical luminaries, it is in part due to an “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom) suffered by a younger generation of French philosophers—Foucault and Derrida, in particular—who had to struggle, at the very beginning of their careers, with the international popularity of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism. Just as black holes can only be made visible by the gravitational distortion they create in the orbital paths of other planetary bodies, then perhaps a familiarity with Sartre’s major work will allow us to more accurately trace our own historical path back to the “age of Hegel.”

Spring 2002 (DIPA, London)

ETS 414: Joyce-Beckett

This course is designed to introduce the student to the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, two Irish authors who stand at the opposite poles of modernist experimentation. We will conduct a survey of their respective works, beginning with Joyce’s short fiction through selections from Ulysses, and concluding with an extended selection from Beckett’s novels and dramatic works. When possible and available, video presentations of Beckett’s plays and dramatizations of Joyce’s fiction will be screened in class; and viewings of Beckett’s theatre will be arranged in Dublin (TBA).

Earlier in the century, Spanish literary historian and aesthetic critic Eugenio d’Ors wrote that the story of Robinson Crusoe is one of the primary unexamined myths belonging to modern European consciousness. Taking d’Ors statement as our thesis, this course will perform a comparative examination of the “Robinson myth” in modern literature and culture. As the title of the seminar indicates, rather than framing our investigation in terms of a literary history of the Robinson tradition, or 17th and 18th century castaway literature, we will use the postmodern and post-colonial “revisions” of Defoe’s original novel to construct our literary ethnography. After reading and discussing Michel Tournier’s Friday and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe we will then return to examine Defoe’s original novel in light of its subsequent cultural, ideological, historical, and literary revisions. Through this comparative textualization of the novel’s central fabula, the ‘island’ of Crusoe will emerge as a site where “constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view” (James Clifford). During the first weeks of the seminar I will introduce three fundamental concepts of Indo-European institutions—hospitality, solitude, and the stranger—through the writings of Benveniste, Diderot, Herder, Hume, and Kant. These concepts will provide the basis for our reading and interpretation of the novels. In order to save on course materials, most of this content will be given in lecture—good notes are essential for this unit—and a mid-term will be given on comprehension. During the semester, I will send small groups to one of the area libraries or museums in order to collect and report on material pertinent to our study of Defoe’s writings.

Fall 2001

ENG 631: Introduction to Critical Theory

This course was successful in meeting its major objectives, although the mechanics were difficult to manage. Continued to improve design of introductory readings in a two session a week format; more guest faculty lectures were incorporated with good results, although it was sometimes difficult to maintain continuity between regular sessions and faculty presentations with so much material to cover in such a short period of time. The size of the class, and the diversity of the background or previous exposure to theory, was a factor in engaging class discussion. In future courses, I will incorporate questions for reading and discussion prior to each week’s assignments, or at the beginning of each section, in order to orient and incite more active participation (based upon an excellent suggestion from student evaluations), and re-introduce the analytic of gender and sexuality (feminism and queer theory) from previous syllabi which I had dropped this time for lack of adequate time (also in response to student suggestions).

Spring 2001

ETS 352: Theory and Modernity: The Schism in Culture

In this course we will interrogate the theme of schism, or “rupture” (Foucault), that frequents the theory and cultural criticism on the subject of modernity. We will ask in what way the understanding of modernity as “a break with the past” also prepares a political determination of aesthetic culture as in a state of “perpetual revolt.” We will also ask in what way this political gesture of culture leads to the emergence of literature and the act of reading as privileged sites of resistance, critique, and what Maurice Blanchot has called “negative community.” In taking up these questions, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which the theories of modernity have been shaped by the social and political variables that belong to its different cultural receptions in Europe, Latin-America, and the United States. Primary theoretical texts may include works by Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Severo Sarduy, Yury Lotman, Jean-François Lyotard, Octavio Paz. In addition to the discussion of the different theoretical perspectives, the class will read Concierto Barroco by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and view and analyze the film Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance), scored by American composer Philip Glass.

ENG 641: Reading Derrida

New course design. Intensive investigation into Derrida’s major works, particularly from the early period. Offered MA students the option of a seminar paper; Ph.D. students from departments of Religion and English were required to undertake a 6 hour mock exam sitting at end of semester, in addition to writing a book review pertaining to recent scholarship in the field.

Fall 2000

ETS 341-3 Introduction to Psychological Theories of Representation: Fictions of the Unconscious from F to Z

This upper-division course in theory will examine psychoanalytic theories of "the unconscious" from the original writings of Sigmund Freud to the recent commentaries by psychoanalytic critic Slavoj Zizek. Special emphasis will be placed on the "application" of psychoanalytic theories to the fields of literature, film, politics, and other forms of culture. Early on we will study Freud’s interpretation of literature and art in essays such as "The Uncanny" (on Hoffman’s "The Sandman") and in essays on Da Vinci and Bernini. Later we will turn to treatments of literature by the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, particularly his readings of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Poe. In the last part of the course, we will focus on the interpretations of modern film by cultural critic Slavoj Zizek, and will screen films by Cronenburg, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynch, Scott, and Wim Wenders. (A separate screening period may be scheduled during the last half of the semester.) The over-all objective of the course will be to examine the history of the relationship between psychoanalytic theories and dominant modes of cultural narrative and fictional representation.

ENG 825-1 Advanced Seminar in Critical Theory: Analytics of "the Unconscious"

Contemporary theories of gender, sexuality, politics, culture, and history all share one concept that remains fundamental to their critical elaboration of an objective sphere of signs and a form of causality that lies behind individual and social phenomena—the notion of an unconscious. First elaborated as such by Freud, the concept itself has undergone significant and sometimes sweeping revision by theorists and philosophers who have applied it to other fields. We will begin the seminar by briefly studying the origin and background of the concept through readings of philosophical texts by Hegel, Hume, and Henri Bergson. We will then focus on Freud's theory of the unconscious, particularly in the "metapsychological" works, in order to distinguish the psychoanalytic field from philosophy and the social sciences. The second half of the seminar will be devoted to the study of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose "Return to Freud," with its incorporation of semiotic and structuralist theories of the sign, has had the greatest impact on contemporary critical theories. We will pay particular attention to the evolution of Lacan's theory by focusing on seminars from the early and late periods (seminar 2, on Freudian technique, and the recently translated seminar 17, on the four discourses—the master, the analyst, the hysteric, and the university), as well as other seminal texts such as "Kant avec Sade," and other writings on the concepts of "the Phallus" and "the Name of the Father." In addition to primary texts by Lacan, we will be guided by the commentaries on Lacan's work by others including Willy Apollon, Judith Butler, Juliet MacCannell and Slavoj Zizek.

As I understand it, the objective of the seminar is a review of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious with particular emphasis on the work of Lacan, whose theories bear the greatest relevance for students of literature, religion, philosophy and culture in the United States. Although the topic is perfectly suited for the student who wants an intensive orientation to psychoanalytic theory, perhaps even the opportunity to read Lacan with a little help from others, I would expect that many graduate students will bring their own research objectives and will make every effort to incorporate these projects into the seminar. Assignments will consist of an annotated bibliography on a selected area of interest and a final presentation.

For graduate students enrolling from the department of English, the suggested prerequisite is the completion of the 631/641 sequence. For students enrolling from another department, or first-year students who have had previous coursework in theory, please consult with Professor Cohan, Director of Graduate Studies, or contact me by e-mail prior to enrolling: mailto:glambert@syr.edu

Finally, those interested in taking the seminar may find it particularly helpful, even fascinating, to read over the summer Elizabeth Roudinesco's excellent biography of the psychoanalytic movement, Lacan & Co.(W.W. Norton), which covers in depth the period of Freud's brief association with Surrealism to the death of Lacan and the dissolution of the Freudian school in France. This text should be readily available through an on-line vendor and I will also order a small number as an optional course text.

Spring 1999

ETS 220-1 Themes in Literature: Native American Literature (Honors Section)

This course introduces the student to the contemporary literature and culture of Native American peoples in the United States. Our focus will be the study of contemporary literary narrative against the background of historical and political questions that have surfaced in Native American communities, and in American society at large, since the 1970's. Major authors and works will include Peter Matheissen's Spirit of Crazy Horse and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman and Greg Sarris' writings on Native American auto-biography; Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead; Louise Erdrich's Tracks and her collection of poetry Baptism of Desire; Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Gerald Vizenor's Griever: An American Monkey King in China.

ETS 473-2 Studies in Institutions: Robinson Crusoe and the Ethnography of the Stranger

Earlier in the century, Spanish literary historian and aesthetic critic Eugenio d'Ors wrote that the story of Robinson Crusoe is one of the primary unexamined myths belonging to modern European consciousness. Taking d'Ors statement as our thesis, this course will perform a comparative examination of the "Robinson myth" which has surfaced in modern literature and culture. In addition to framing our investigation in terms of a literary history of the Robinson tradition, or 17th and 18th century castaway literature, we will use the postmodern and post-colonial "re-visions" of Defoe's original novel to construct a literary anthropology of 'the culture of the Stranger.' After reading and discussing Michel Tournier's Friday (Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique), Muriel Spark's Robinson, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and Marrianne Wiggins' John Dollar, we will then return to examine Defoe's novel in light of its subsequent cultural, ideological, historical, and literary revisions. Through this comparative textualization of the novel's central fabula, the 'island' of Crusoe will emerge as a site where "constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view" (Clifford).

Fall 1999

ETS 141-2 Reading and Interpretation I: From Language to Discourse (Honors)

ETS 141 is the first prerequisite for the English and Textual Studies major. It is designed to provide students with an intensive introduction to the critical elements of literary and cultural analysis. In examining the 'passages' from language (understood as the system of linguistic relations that define the subject of language) to discourse (understood as both the formal and concrete social and historical uses of language), we will be examining the three "fundamental analytics" that have contributed to a new epistemological understanding of the passages between language and discourse: semiotics and structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and historical materialism. Consequently, the course will be divided into three major units. In each of these units we will take up and examine the principal texts and authors for the corresponding analytic (e.g., Saussure, Freud, Marx-Engels); then, at the end of each unit, we will turn to briefly review the subsequent developments and applications they receive by modern and contemporary theorists, philosophers, and critics.

ENG 825-1 Advanced Seminar in Critical Theory: Analytics of the Postmodern Sublime Meets with REL 667

The Advanced Seminar in Theory is designed to offer the opportunity of an intensive study of a major theorist, a critical term, concept, or debate which has importantly influenced the field of critical theory in the contemporary period. This year's seminar will take up an analysis of the concept of the sublime in postmodern philosophy, and will be co-taught and offered in conjunction with Professor Charles E. Winquist's REL 667: "Postmodern Theology." During the 1970s, in particular, the notion of the sublime was frequently at the center of critical debates in philosophy and theory, debates which had a lasting effect on the history of deconstruction, aesthetic philosophy and theories of spectatorship, feminism and theories of the body, psychoanalytic theories after Freud, and postmodern theology. The seminar will focus on understanding the concept of the sublime in the context of many of the most influential texts from this period. In addition to a close reading and discussion of Kant's Critique of Judgment, other texts will include the following: Martin Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Jacques Derrida's Truth in Painting, Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Differend and The Lessons of the Analytic of the Sublime, Jacques Lacan's seminars The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Encore, Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous' Newly-Born Woman (La jeune nee), and selections from Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology and Metastatis of Enjoyment. For graduate students enrolling in this course from the Department of English, the completion of the ENG 631/641 series during their first year is normally required; however, this requirement can be waived by permission of instructor. Please direct any inquiries to me through the English Department or by e-mail at glambert@syr.edu

Fall 1998

ETS 141-5 Reading and Interpretation 1: From Language to Discourse

ETS 141 is a required course for the major. In accordance with the title, "from language to discourse," we will be examining the three "fundamental analytics" that have contributed to a new epistemological understanding of the passages between language and discourse: linguistic and semiotic analysis, psychoanalysis, and marxist analysis. I define these as "fundamental analytics" in the sense that all subsequent theory and critical knowledge, particularly in the study of literature and culture, are in some way informed by their methodology and concepts. The course will be divided into three major units. In each of these units we will take up and examine the principle texts and thinkers that founded the corresponding analytic; then, at the end of each unit, we will turn to briefly review the subsequent developments and applications they receive by modern and contemporary theorists, philosophers, and critics.

ENG 631-1 Introduction to Critical Theory

This required seminar constitutes a basic introduction to the different theories and critical methodologies that currently inform the various disciplines and fields which comprise the study of literature and culture. Among the variety of different theoretical traditions we may review next fall will include the primary historical works as well as recent developments within Marxism, Feminism, Post-Colonial Theory, Psychoanalysis, Literary History and Cultural Studies. We will also spend some time reading about and discussing the current developments in the contemporary university which may influence the future direction of English and Cultural Studies in the United States.

Spring 1998

ETS 241-4 Reading and Interpretation II: Reading Kafka

It would not be an exaggeration to say that many critics and philosophers in the modern period have found themselves, at some point, obsessed with the ineluctable problem of reading Kafka. This course, therefore, is as much about the question of "reading Kafka," as of reading Kafka's readers (i.e., his biographers, critics, and theorists). In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the body of Kafka's short-works, his diaries, and letters; as well as longer works such as The Trial and The Castle, we will also read much of the commentary of critics, intellectuals, and philosophers who have found in Kafka's writings and in his life a presentiment of "the diabolical powers knocking at our door" (Deleuze-Guattari). Among others, these will include Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arrendt, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Elias Cannetti, Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Ernst Pawel, and Avital Ronell. We will also turn our attention to a study of the "Kafkaesque" as a cultural and/or existential clich‚ which marks in some ways our peculiar relationships with modernity, the apparatus of the modern State, and with the spirit of late-capitalism.

ENG 641-1 Theorizing Practices of Reading: Literary Knowledge and Role of the Reader

In this course we will review the emergence of "the reader" and "the critic" as dominant cultural personages in the Anglo-American and Continental criticism of the 70s and early 80s. Theoretical and critical texts will include those by Barthes, De Man, Derrida, Fetterly, Fish, Gilbert, Graff, Pratt, Said, Williams and others; and will include the debates surrounding the emergence of deconstruction in the United States, reader- response criticism, feminist criticism, cultural criticism, and ideology critique. In our analysis of these major figures and debates, we will pay close attention to the major publications, anthologies, conferences or conference sessions of the MLA that established these theories as authoritative models or "schools" which were incorporated into the institutional history of American literary criticism and theories of public culture. It is for this reason that one of the primary "texts" for the course will be the ongoing discussions and debates which appeared in the influential academic journal Critical Inquirybetween 1970 and 1985.

The guiding questions for the course are the following: What form of knowledge is "literary knowledge" (as opposed to other modes of discursive knowledge)? How does literature present or embody "a form of knowing" that must be distinguished from intuition or from an understanding arrived at through concepts? What is the role of the reader in this form? In constructing our responses to these questions, we will explore in what ways modern constructions of "literary knowledge" concern the position and the role that is performed by the reader in both a social (i.e. institutional) and performative sense. We will also investigate why the figure of the reader and of the activity of reading have become increasingly prevalent in post-modern epistemologies that have assigned them a crucial function in the transformation of the literary experience into forms of social and political knowledge. Consequently, we will pay particular attention to the relationship between the literary text, private experience, and public identity; as well as to the emergence of new configurations between private and public forms of sociological and cultural activities that the position of the modern reader and critic have come to exemplify.

The graduate student should come away from this course with a very good understanding of recent American intellectual history in the fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as the various major debates and theoretical positions that have shaped the current discussions in "the profession" today.