RMS 132: Critical Theory and Critical Approaches in English Studies 60 Hours

Course Introduction: The course will act as a survey of theories, approaches and
movements in literary studies. The emphasis should be given to help participants locate
the ideas and their emergence in specific socio-historical contexts.

Course Objectives
• To explore the various currents, pressures, and directions in contemporary
criticism as aspects of the cultural present and as an ongoing conversation
with intellectual precursors and earlier traditions of literary study.
• To enable readers to build their own sense of the map of modern literary
critical practice.

Course Description

Module I 10 Hrs
Concepts of Criticism and Aesthetic Origins: Literature; Theory; Mimesis; Expressivity:
The Romantic Theory of Authorship; Interpretation: Hermeneutics; Value: Criticisms,
Canons, and Evaluation

Module II 15 Hrs
Criticism and Theory up to Nineteenth Century: Ancient Greek Criticism – Plato and
Aristotle; The Greek and Roman traditions of Rhetoric; Neo-Platonism, St Augustine and
St Thomas Aquinas; Medieval Humanism; Neo-classical Literary Criticism; The
Enlightenment; The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics; Hegel; Romanticism in
Germany, France, England and America and the colonies; Realism and Naturalism;
Symbolism and Aestheticism; The Heterological Thinker – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Bergson, Arnold.

Module III 15 Hrs

Criticism and Critical Practices in the Twentieth Century: Literature and the Academy;
T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition; Anthropology and/as Myth in Modern Criticism;
F.R. Leavis: Criticism and Culture; Marxist Aesthetics; William Empson: From Verbal
Analysis to Cultural Criticism; The New Criticism; Intentional Fallacy; Adorno and the
Frankfurt School; Freud and Psychoanalysis; The Russian Debate on Narrative; Bakhtin
and the Dialogic Principle; Form, Rhetoric, and Intellectual History; Cultural Studies.

Module IV 10 Hrs
Literary Theory: Movements and Schools: Formalisms; Structuralism and Narrative
Poetics; Psychoanalysis after Freud; Deconstruction; Feminisms; Reader-Response and
Reception Theory; Postcolonialism; Historicism and New Historicism; Postmodernism;
Sexualities; Science and Criticism.

Module V 10 Hrs
Recent Developments: Performing Literary interpretation; Questions of responsibilities
of the writer; Mixing Memory and Desire; Psychoanalysis, Psychology, and Trauma
theory; Theories of Gaze; Anti-Canon Theory; Environmentalism and Ecocriticism;
Cognitive Literary Criticism;

Suggested Texts for Reading and Discussion

Terry Eagleton, ‘What is Literature?’
Plato, From Republic ‘Book X’
Loius Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Structural Analysis of Narrative’
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’
Roland Barthes, ‘Work to Text’
Gerard Gennete, ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’
Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’
Judith Butler, ‘Antigone’s Claim’

Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th ed. New York: Wardworth, 2005.
Ahmand, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Rpt. New Delhi: OUP, 2006.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, literature, deconstruction.
London/New York: Routledge, 2001.
Devy, G.N., ed. Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation. Rpt.
Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008
---. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 2005.
Gurrin, Wilfred L, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th ed. New
York: OUP, 2005.
Habib, M.A.R., ed. A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the
Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
John, Eileen, and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds. Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary
and Classic Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
John, Eileen, and Dominic McIver Lopes. Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary
and Classic Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Kapoor, Kapil. Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual Framework. New Delhi:
Affiliated East-West Press, 1998.
Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum, 2006
Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York:
Norton, 2001.
Rice, Philip, and Patricia Waugh. Modern Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Hodder
Arnold, 2001.
Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Rev ed. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003.
Rooney, Ellen ed. Feminist Literary Theory. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
Waugh, Patricia. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: OUP, 2006.