The first few weeks of the course hinge on the difference between “theory” and “theories” of literature; while on one hand we will be discussing the history of a variety of competing theories of literature or literaryness (and to understand why and when they appeared), on the other we will attempt a broader consideration of “theory” as a whole, as a genre or mode of thought that unites competing ideas (ideas as different as, say, Marxism and psychoanalysis) within a larger framework.

It is that framework that people refer to when they say things like, “I hate theory,” or “I do theory,” and so the question of what it would mean to hate theory, or do it, will reverse, as it were, the opening conundrum of the course. Continue reading →

This course started out as a narrowly focused reading of the role that translation as a concept and as a practice played in the literary period circumscribed most strictly by the word “modernism”— roughly the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II in the UK, Ireland, and the United States. Right now it’s more of a course on translation in general—translation both metaphorical and literal—and the manner in which it has been both a literary and epistemological practice. Continue reading →

This course is designed primarily for those of you working in or on literature; specifically it aims to give you a background in the history of the ideas (and the history of “history”) that have shaped the past two centuries in the sciences and social sciences, particularly as they anticipate, relate, or participate in the creation of modernism and modernity (two vitally different things). Continue reading →