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新学期课程：Literaray Theory (研究生讨论班)

发布时间：2011-08-28 | 作者：博雅学院

Graduate Theory Seminar，Fall 2011
  Readings in Literary Criticism and Critical Theory
    博雅学院2011级研究生必修，2009级本科生选修（须经院长批准）
    时间：周一，14:25－16:05（9月19日开始）
    教室：I-205
    语言：英语
授课人 ：Lorraine Wong (高研院驻院学人，Ph.D. New York University； MPhil, Cambridge University； BA, University of Hong Kong)
 
This course offers a critical introduction to the problem of language and representation as a common concern in philosophy and literature.  It explores how the debates on language and representation have transformed philosophical inquiry and literary criticism into “critical theory.”  We will start with the Platonic idea of logos that assigns speech a superior position over writing and defines the tradition of western metaphysics of language.  Through reading foundational texts by Plato, Rousseau and Fichte, we will have a basic understanding of the importance of speech in the signification of truth and the exercise of reason, as well as the political meaning of freedom and authenticity that is associated with having a voice of one’s own.  We will then move on to the twentieth century where the traditional speech-centered view of language, or what Derrida calls “phonocentrism,” is challenged by literary critics and philosophers in response to the rise of instrumentalism in modern society and the concurrent crisis of language brought about by information technology, consumer society and the colonial and totalitarian states.  Focusing on works by Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Simon de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Gilles Deleuze, Frederic Jameson, Edward Said and Johannes Fabian, we examine how modern theorists of culture come to re-conceptualize language when the classical notion of representation can no longer hold together the rift between things and words, language and the world, in modern society.
 
Evaluation will be based on 1) weekly response papers on the assigned readings, 2) one mid-term examination on Part I, 3) one analysis of a poem or short narrative in conversation with one of the theoretical texts from Part II, 4) an oral presentation, and 5) participation in class discussion.
 
Part I
Week 1: Metaphysics and Speech
       Plato, Phaedrus
 
Week 2: Man, Nation and Speech
       Rousseau, On the Origin of Language
       Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (4th, 5th, 6th and 13th addresses)
 
Week 3: Speech, Writing and Language
       Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (selection)
       Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
 
 
Week 4: Nature, Culture, Writing
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of the Inequality among Men
            Derrida, “Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages” (Of Grammatology, 165-194)
 
Week 5: Ideograph as an Object of Imagination
Pound and Fenollosa, “The Written Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry”
            Derrida, “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science” (Of Grammatology, 74-87)      
 
Week 6: Monologue and Self-representation
       Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”
       --- “The Ego and the Super-Ego” (The Ego and the Id)
 
Week 7: Feminist Critique of Representation
Lacan, “The Symbolic Order” (from “The Function and Field of Speech and  Language in Psychoanalysis”)
       de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (selection)
 
Week 8: Mother-tongue and its Estrangement
       Deleuze, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
 
Week 9: Author and Intelligibility
       Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (The Rustle of Language)
Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement” (MLN 94, no. 5, Comparative Literature, (Dec., 1979), pp. 919-930.)
 
Week 10: Mid-term Exam
 
Part II
Week 11: Language, the Masses, Totalitarianism
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Illuminations)
---. “The Author as Producer” (Reflections)
 
Week 12: Language, Experience, Storytelling
Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” (Illuminations, 83-111)
Ricoeur, “The Creativity of Language” (Dialogues with Continental Philosophers)
 
Week 13: Language, Discourse, Power
Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (Critique Inquiry 8, summer 1982)
       ---. “Two Lectures” (Culture/Power/History)
---. “What is an Author” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice)
 
 
Week 14: Language, Ideology, Subjectivity
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Mapping Ideology)   
Gramsci, “Philosophy, Common Sense, Language and Folklore” (The Antonio Gramsci Reader)
 
Week 15: Language, History, Geopolitics
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (selection)
---. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (Social Text 15, autumn 1986) 
 
Week 16: Language and the Other
Said, Orientalism (selection)
Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (selection)
 
Week 17: Conclusion: Can we get away from the loop of narrative?
       Kafka, The Trial (selection)
       Film screening: Orson Welles, The Trial
 
Week 18: Presentation of the analyses of the literary texts