The course will take a survey form, aiming to introduce students to the history of engagement with literary (and other artistic) forms. As a result, the course, while allowing for conversations across time, will take the route of thinking in linear time to examine developments of thought regarding literature. In doing so, the limits of such linear imagination would also be exposed. It will take the crystallisation of ‘Literature’ as an autonomous domain as the ground to examine how a canon was formed over time.
Possible modules listed below.
What is Literature? Historical formation of an autonomous domain for disciplinary and critical consideration; ‘critique’ and ‘imagination’ in determination of the human subject, beginning with the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and made central by the literary critical efforts by the Romantics; traditions in organising criticism/theory including chronological, or based on ideological or historical co-incidences; thinking with and through enduring debates, "schools", convergences Aesthetics and Ethics Theories of art making in antiquity with an attention to writings in the Greek, Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit traditions, focusing of different conceptual and classificatory practices
Authors, Genres, Traditions Career of the concept of the author, genre and literary traditions, ranging from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, author-centric critical practices and concepts such as “intentional fallacy,” and re-consideration of the author figure; development of canons around authors and literary traditions modelled by and around Mathew Arnold and TS Eliot among, others; the emergence of the ‘lyric’ and later the novel as units of analysis in the context of debates around “literary fact” (Mary Poovey)
Language, Form and Close Reading Centralisation of the practice of language as constituting the central thematic for literary criticism/theory, with the emergence of ‘New Criticism’, ‘Practical Criticism’ and Russian Formalism, and structuralist linguistics and anthropology on the other hand; further development of and response to these debates by scholars of post-structuralist and narratological persuasions
The Material Foundations of Literature Critical thinking that framed literature in relation to material and infrastructural foundations through Marxism and psychoanalysis; “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Paul Ricouer)
What Literature? Challenges to the boundary-making practices ingrained in the concept of literature as it emerged in the Anglo-American tradition of literary criticism /theory; shifts occasioned by political impulses and/or geo-political considerations: challenges from Feminist theory, race theory, postcolonial theory, or theories and reading practices grappling with issues of sexuality, ethnicity and caste; translation and the emergence of the discipline of Comparative Literature and the field of ‘World Literature’
Literature and other fields/disciplines The question of autonomy of literature and its relationship with other fields and disciplines: relationship of literature with disciplines such as history, anthropology and sociology, which has been theorised extensively, and the natural sciences (especially with a focus on the environment), medicine and the law, more recently; the exchanges between the literary and the popular
Post-critique The “post-critical” (from the late 1990s and as loosely called): return to the history of the formation of the discipline and its assumptions, in face of the challenges that the discipline faced as discussed in the previous module, such as how literature came to be imagined as providing knowledge and attempts to re-state the salience of the ‘literature’; historicisation of literary criticism as a dynamic space that needs re-imagination and re-invention; methodologies developed in light of the digital turn or re-animation of newer textual reading practices