Eric Hayot

At first this course will seem to be a course about poetry, but it is in truth a course about reading. Poetry will be our first vehicle for this learning, and we will spend ten weeks looking at poems and thinking about ways to read them. We will discuss meter and rhyme; we will learn how to scan a poem; we will articulate differences in tone or color produced by enjambment, caesura, verse form, subject, history.  Following the mid term, we will read a short story, a novel, and a film in order to extend, via metaphor or translation, the reading of poetry to other things: we will move from “reading poetry” to simply “reading”—the work of the profession of English literature, the basic building block of all literary analysis. We thus begin by reading and end by reading, and reading will—if we let it—make us, and make us readers.

Learning will require you to do three different kinds of work. First I expect you to do the reading, and to do it well—when you read for class I expect you to arrive having not simply scanned the material but having thought about it. You should come to class EVERY TIME with at least one question or comment about the text—if I call on you I will expect you to be ready to articulate that question or comment. Secondly, I am asking you to write four short papers—two on the poetry, one each on the other subjects of the course—that address some significant critical question or analyze a text in detail. Finally, there will be a two-day-long in-class midterm exam and a final exam, both of which will include short answer questions, quotation identifications, and short and long essays. I will also ask you to memorize and recite a poem in front of the class—this assignment will not be graded but is required to pass the class. Before you recite your poem, I’ll ask you to say a few words about the poet whose work you’ll read.

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The course will focus entirely on “Virginia Woolf.” What exactly “Virginia Woolf” means will also be one of the subjects of the course, and our method for finding out will be to read lots of texts written by Virginia Woolf, and one text titled Virginia Woolf. We will also attempt to place Woolf in a series of contexts—literary historical, biographical, cultural. We will do these things in order to think about what it means to think about a single literary author, what kinds of limitations such a focus offers, or challenges it provides.

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Does the meaning of a story depend on how one tells it? Do physical forms of narration (paper, voice, screen) affect how, or what, a story means? Is there a grammar of narrative, and if so, what does it look like? This course aims to answer those questions by looking at the history of the discipline known as “narratology,” tracing it from its early-ish beginnings with structuralism through to its later manifestations in the field of cyber-literature and cognitive science. We will take the different objects of our narratological analysis, from Proust to Welles to the computer game Civilization 3 to the structure of the human mind, and rub them against the grain of the theories we read, so that the media can frustrate or extend, as it were, the narrative theories we read. When, in a final gesture of self-reflexive fun, we turn our narrative eyes to the narrative theory itself, we will consider “theory” as yet another iteration of narrative possibility, one that may or may not, in the cases of the texts we read, practice what it preaches.

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This course traces the historical influence in literary criticism and theory of two of the major post-structuralist thinkers of the twentieth century. We’ll begin by reading works by Derrida and Foucault, then follow up with articles and books by those who have read the two philosophers. The “legacy” readings are organized to produce brief glimpses of queer studies (Edelman, Butler), postcolonial studies (Spivak, Said, Saussy, Stoler), feminism (Gallop, Sawicki) and literary critical strategy (de Man, Armstrong, Miller).

We’ll finish with Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, a book whose consciousness of the legacy of both Derrida and Foucault arrives via the inevitable self-othering of time.

“Even an ordinary ‘was,’ in a report of something that was not, acquires a new formal quality from the fact that it was not so.”

– Theodor Adorno

Frame for a movement, mask of complication, foil of the avant-garde: the term “modernism” has come, in the literary context, to reveal as much as it conceals, to tell as much as it holds in reserve. Our approach to the question of what modernism is will therefore be general of necessity; it will grasp its definitions where it can find them: trope, style, habit, frame, figure.

The course makes its way through modernism’s literary and literary critical greatest hits so as to give a broad introduction to the historical and intellectual shape of the period; it also attends to the more practical questions of how modernism gets defined in the academy through syllabi, conferences, journals, and the like. Students should leave the class with a clear sense of how they might approach teaching a modernism survey as well as how they might begin to think about doing dissertation-level work in the field.

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Looking at a Europe physically ravaged by the deaths and destruction of the Second World War, morally ravaged by the fact of the war’s Holocaust, Theodor Adorno famously declared that “After Auschwitz […]to write a poem is barbaric.”

And yet, despite Adorno’s warning, the post-war period in Europe produced not only great literature (even about the Holocaust), but a host of texts that redefined (and continue to redefine) Western conceptions of the aesthetic, of history, of the self and its relation to the social, of the structure of the fabric of reality, among other things (a canon otherwise known as “theory”).

This course aims, through a historical reading of post-war developments in literature, philosophy, and film, to provide students with an extensive and culturally specific understanding of the major aesthetic and theoretical developments of the 20th century.

We intend for this historical and cultural reading to provide a general background in aesthetics and theory for all students of literature, but also to suggest, more methodologically, that an attention to the cultural and historical specificity of ideas can produce not simply theories about this or that defined “era” (e.g., 1946-1975), but also a more general appreciation of the movement of ideas in and out of local and global contexts.

This approach should prove particularly useful for students who have struggled with the difficulty of applying French and German theory to literature in English or, conversely, reconciling French and German literature and film with moments in American history (the Cold War, the Kennedy Era, Vietnam, the crisis of 1973).

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Writing in the introduction to her 1990 anthology, The Gender of Modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott recalls that modernism “as we were taught it at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine…. Much of what … men had to say about the crisis in gender identification that underlies much of modernist literature was left out or read from a limited perspective.” If, as Scott argues, a general crisis of gender identification underlies modernist literature, then any discussion on gender and modernism (or women in it) ought to have implications for a broader definition of modernism itself. This course aims to sketch the outlines of such a definition.

Beginning with Madame Bovary, often called the “first modern novel,” and Andrea Dworkin’s critique of its gender politics, we will open the question of the modern (and its relationship to modernism) before moving on to Freud. These two texts will establish a background, as it were, for the modernists we will consider in the rest of the course; we will be moving back and forth from primary texts (including novels, poetry, and essays) to secondary ones (theories of modernism, theories of gender, theories of their interaction), carrying with us a sustained attention not simply to the gender of modernist content but also the implications of its form.

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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. That is, if we have enough sense of how to hate it (and what there is hateful about it), or how to do it (and what gets “done” in that doing), we may well find that we then have the wherewithal to describe what it is exactly that we’re hating or doing (or, as Roland Barthes would tell us, loving).

All this may sound quite mysterious, which is ok. Though much of the course is designed to demystify the things that seem difficult or incomprehensible about (doing) theory, we will remain attentive to its mysteries as well; not understanding something will usually be as useful as seeing it with an epiphanic clarity.

Because of the difficulty of the texts we will be reading and the kinds of analysis we will perform, I strongly recommend that you take English 380 (Literary Analysis) before taking this class.

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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. Partly because such a narrow focus seemed inappropriate for an undergraduate class, and partly because I knew that we would spend at least six weeks of the course simply reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, the course began to take on another shape. 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. The authors whose fictional texts we will read—Ezra Pound, James Joyce, H.D., Jorge Luis Borges, Gloria Naylor, and Araki Yasusada—all wrote during the twentieth century, and the first three were major figures of Anglo-American modernism. Naylor and Yasusada are both post-modern and postmodern, in ways that may become clear as we move through the material. As for Borges, he occupies an intermediary space.

We will accompany our readings of these literary texts with a sustained engagement with the discipline of “translation studies,” reading essays of varying degrees of philosophic complexity alongside the so-called “primary” texts. These essays will establish a set of questions, a vocabulary, or even a philosophical foundation from which we might make forays into the literary. As this is my first time teaching this course, I do not know where it will end up; in some sense this is a course without a destination. It will be your task to work together to get somewhere, and, once you’re there, to name and describe that somewhere in such a way as to make it the measure of our common intellectual progress.

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How this course will progress is something of a mystery to me; I have put it together without any secret grand narrative to be unwrapped on the final day of class like some fantastic present that explains everything. It will not move, then, like most courses, toward somewhere in particular (a theory, a goal, a larger understanding). Instead I am thinking of it as an act of piling on—we will read things and talk about them and then put them in a pile of things we know; as the pile gets bigger we will begin to use our new readings to scrape at it, or frame it, or as tools for seeing new shapes in the pile. By the end of the semester I’m hoping we like the shape of the pile, or, failing like, that we at least will see in the pile some ways in which our realities have been shaped by what we have put there.

What will this course do for you? It 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). Within the limitations of a semester, we will not cover everything; but we are aiming for a general look at things rather than a specific one (that is, the course is not a course in 18th century natural history). As we read, you will be asked to write two papers and do one class presentation focused specifically on the course material (and only on the course material); these papers should be close readings of one text or another that take up some interesting (even vital) concern and the modes of its expression. Toward the end of the course, you will write a final paper that weds the course material with some literary or cultural material of your own choice—preferably, for your sake, literary or cultural material that relates in some way to your own particular literary or cultural interests.

As a prelude to writing the paper, and in order to provide you with professional training that will be useful to those of you who wish to become professors, you will be required not only to produce an abstract of your final paper (in response to its assignment, which will be written as a call for papers), but also to be interviewed by your peers in the class about the abstract, its relation to the ideas in the course, and its relation to whatever you conceive as your own “work.” Your submission of the final paper will be accompanied by a revised abstract, both of them produced, hopefully, under the influence of some useful suggestions received during the interview process.

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