This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Readings

A course Reader will contain most of the theoretical readings, though I may add or change some of the readings depending on the direction the class is taking or what issues seem to call for further discussion. In addition, you will be asked to read a part or all of the following required texts:

Buy at Amazon Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York, NY: Tribeca Books, 2011. ISBN: 9781936594191.

Buy at Amazon Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010. ISBN: 9780465019779.

Buy at Amazon Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1990. ISBN: 9780679724698.

TOPICS
New Criticism and Reader Response Theory
Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Buy at Amazon Brooks, Cleanth. "Keats's Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes." In The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York, NY: Mariner Books, 1956. ISBN: 9780156957052.

Buy at Amazon Wimsatt, William Kurtz. "The Intentional Fallacy." In The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1954. ISBN: 9780813101118.

Wimsatt, William Kurtz, and M. C. Beardsley. "The Affective Fallacy." The Sewanee Review 57, no. 1 (1949): 31-55.

Milton, John. Sonnets XVIII-XX.

Mailloux, Steven. "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" Critical Inquiry 3, no. 1 (1976): 31-55.

Buy at Amazon Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780674467262.

Structuralism 1

Bremond, Claude. "Morphology of the French Folktale." Semiotica 2, no. 3 (1970): 247-276.

Buy at Amazon Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780231157278.

The Brothers Grimm. "Rapunzel."

Greimas, A. J., and F. Rastier. "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 86-105.

Notes 4 (PDF)
Notes on overview of Saussure

Structuralism 2

Buy at Amazon Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. New York, NY: Prestwick House, 2005. ISBN: 9781580495936. [Download a version from the Internet Classics Archive]

Buy at Amazon Levi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." In Structural Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983. ISBN: 9780226474915.

Buy at Amazon Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" In The Foucault Reader. New York, NY: Pantheon, 1984. ISBN: 9780394713403.

Derrida and Deconstruction 1

Buy at Amazon Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In Writing and Difference. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 9780415255370.

Buy at Amazon Levi-Strauss, Claude. Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971. ISBN: 9780807046692.

Buy at Amazon ———. "The Writing Lesson." In Tristes Tropiques. New York, NY: Penguin, 1992. ISBN: 9780140165623.

Notes 5 (PDF)
Notes on extract from "Elementary Structures"

Notes 6 (PDF)
Notes on Structure, Sign and Play

Derrida and Deconstruction 2

Buy at Amazon Dinesen, Isak. "The Blank Page." In Last Tales. New York, NY: Vintage, 1991. ISBN: 9780679736400.

Buy at Amazon Austin, John Langshaw. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, lecture I. ISBN: 9780674411524.

Buy at Amazon Johnson, B. "Nothing Fails Like Success." In World of Difference. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780801837456.

Buy at Amazon Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007, pp. 110-134. ISBN: 9780801474057.

Psychoanalysis

Buy at Amazon Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. vii-xv, and 3-19. ISBN: 9780199538843.

Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Ecrits, A Selection (1949): 1-7.

Psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan 1

Buy at Amazon Zizek, Slavoj. Chapter 1 in Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 9780415772594.

Buy at Amazon Lacan, J. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. ISBN: 9780393329254.

Buy at Amazon Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1997. ISBN: 9780860919711.

Notes (PDF)
Notes on Zizek's graphs

Psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan 2

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Purloined Letter."

Lacan, Jacques. "The seminar on The Purloined Letter." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 39-72.

Buy at Amazon Felman, Shoshana. "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida." In Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780801827549.

Michel Foucault

Buy at Amazon Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990. ISBN: 9780679724698.

Buy at Amazon ———. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Vintage, 1995, pp. 135-195. ISBN: 9780679752554.

Buy at Amazon Davidson, Arnold I. "Foucault Revolutionizes History." In Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1998. ISBN: 9780226137148.

Buy at Amazon Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York, NY: Tribeca Books, 2011. ISBN: 9781936594191.

Badiou, Deleuze

Buy at Amazon Deleuz, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Chapter 6 in Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780816614028.

Buy at Amazon Badios, Alain. Chapter 1 in Infinite Thought. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005. ISBN: 9780826479297.

Buy at Amazon ———. Chapter 6 in Theoretical Writings. New York, NY: Continuum, 2006. ISBN: 9780826493248.