Bernadette Andrea, Alan Liu, Mark Maslan, Christopher Newfield, Rita Raley, Glyn Salton-Cox, Russell Samolsky

All works from the following list (except the full-length books specified at the end and those marked with an *) are from David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition:  Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 3rd ed. (Bedford, 2006).

For help in creating a “cognitive map” of the history of theory, students should also consult such texts as: M. H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, Raymond Williams’s Keywords,  Rene Wellek’s A History of Modern Criticism, and other anthologies of theory such as Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato  (2d ed). Those marked with a cross (+) are digitized and available online, consult with the Staff Graduate Adviser.

From Part One of the Richter Anthology.

• Plato, Republic, Book X +
• Aristotle, Poetics +
• Horace, The Art of Poetry +
• Longinus, On the Sublime +
• Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry +
• Aphra Behn, Preface to The Lucky Chance +
• Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism +
• Samuel Johnson, from “Preface to Shakespeare” +
• David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste +
• Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Judgement +
• William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads +
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria +
• John Keats, from Letter to George and Thomas Keats +
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry +
• G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Art +
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet +
• Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time +
• Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and Part I, On the Genealogy of Morals (*) +
• Henry James, The Art of Fiction +
• T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent +
• W.E.B. Du Bois, from The Souls of Black Folk +
• Mikhail Bakhtin, from Discourse in the Novel (“Heteroglossia”) +
• Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare’s Sister from A Room of One’s Own +
• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (*) +
• Kenneth Burke, Literature as Equipment for Living +
• J.L. Austin, from How to Do Things with Words +
• Simone de Beauvoir, Myths: Of Women in Five Authors +
• Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature +
• Erich Auerbach, Odysseus’ Scar +

From Part Two of the Richter Anthology.

1. Formalisms
   • Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” +
     W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley,
   • “The Intentional Fallacy” +
   • Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure” +
2. Structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction
   • Ferdinand de Saussure, “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” +
   • Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” +
   • Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” +
   • Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”
   • Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” +
   • Paul de Man, from Blindness and Insight (chapter 1) and “The Resistance to Theory” (*)
3. Reader-Response Criticism
   • Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” +
   • Hans Robert Jauss, “The Three Stages of Interpretation” +
4. Psychoanalytic Theory
   • Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (*) and “Mourning and Melancholia” (*) +
   • Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage and “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” +
   • Harold Bloom, “A Meditation upon Priority” +
   • Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” +
5. Marxist Criticism
   • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” +
   • Louis Althusser, from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses +
   • Raymond Williams, from Marxism and Literature +
     Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious +
6. New Historicism and Cultural Studies
   • Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (*) +
   • Pierre Bourdieu, from Distinction +
   • Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets” (*) +
   • John Guillory, from Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation +
7. & 8. Feminist Literary Criticism/Gender Studies and Queer Theory
   • Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time”
   • Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” +
   • Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One” (*) +
   • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet +
8.  [see above]
9. Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies
   • Edward W. Said, from the Introduction to Orientalism +
   • Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (*) +
   • Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes” +
10. Theorizing Postmodernism
    • Jean Baudrillard, from The Precession of Simulacra +
    • Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity” +
    • Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
    • Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” +

• Karl Marx, Capital (Part I of Vol. I) +
• Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (Chapters II-IV, VI, VII)
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (pp. 1-165) and The Gift of Death (Chapter 3)
• Roland Barthes, S/Z (pp. 3-33, 221-54)
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I
• Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (concluding essay: “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”) +
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (chapters 1-2, 14) +
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (Chapters 1-2) +
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Introduction, Part 3) +

Revised 6/07