Time Schedule:
Katherine Cummings
ENGL 304
Seattle Campus
Contemporary criticism and theory and its background in the New Criticism, structuralism, and phenomenology.
Class description
“What’s Happening Here� Let’s face it; theory has a bad rep. The popular press and sectors of academia have pilloried its language (who can read this stuff) and arguments as either irrelevant to everyday existence or fomenting disastrous socio-political realignments. Not surprisingly, this course is designed to question these accounts, but it does take seriously the critique of theory as an alienating abstraction. To ask what’s happening here is to question what the study of theory offers to undergraduates who may or may not be interested in pursuing post graduate degrees. To explore answers to that question we’ll engage in close readings and evaluations of a critical conversation that begins with Marx and Nietzche and is complicated and extended by such contemporary theorists as Balibar, Brown, Butler, Foucault, Harvey, and Lowe. Of each theoretical text, we will ask what does this argument contribute not only to our understanding of ourselves and the systems by which we are shaped but also to our refashioning of them. Throughout this investigation we will keep an eye on the productive relationship between these theories and late 20th and 21st century US geopoltics. Among the topics that we’ll take up are social movements advocating for people of color, women and sexual minorities, the “war on terror� and the contemporary “Occupy Wall Street� movement.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
