Since the 1980s, many literary critics and theorists have developed paradigms of "culture" that depend implicitly or explicitly on revisionary ideas about the relation of literature to history. This graduate seminar covers some of the basic 20th-century movements necessary for an understanding of the historical/historicist element in contemporary literary criticism.
Topics include: 19th and early 20th-century historicism, formalism, history and structuralism, New Marxisms, Annales history and history of "mentalities," Foucault, cultural anthropology and New Cultural History, the New Historicism, postmodernism and history. What "is" history in the post-1968 moment when the very essence, or essentialism, of history as a mode of being is in question?
The course will end with a reflection on the role of historical understanding in information culture. Requirements include one presentation and one final essay. Students may also choose to produce instead of the final essay a shorter essay complemented by a Web site on their topic.
Instructor Alan Liu
Office and Office Hours SH 2607
By appointment.
Location/Time
South Hall 2635
T, 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Required Texts R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed.,
ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford UP, 1994) Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford
Univ. Press, 1985) Fernand Braudel, On History (U. Chicago Press, 1982) Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (U. Chicago
Press, 1972) Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (Vintage
Books, 1988) Class Reader available from Alternative Copy Shop
Assignments (more)
10% Presentation of Essay Idea 10% Prospectus for Essay 80% Essay (or Web Site)
Alan Liu 
