I. Literary Theory
A. History of
Literary Theory and Criticism
Plato, “Ion” and Republic (Book X)
Aristotle, Poetics
Horace, The Art of Poetry
Longinus, On the Sublime
Plotinus, On the Intellectual Beauty
Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande della Scala
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Definition of Poetry
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
David Hume, “On the Standard of Taste”
Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Book I & II)
Friedrich von Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”
Madame de Stael, Essay on Fiction
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry
Georg W. F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of Art
Matthew Arnold, From The Study of Poetry and “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter”
*Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
B. The Twentieth
Century
Post-structuralism
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play” and “Signature, Event, Context”
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is
Postmodernism” in The Postmodern Condition
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (English Edition)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Marxism and
Ideological Criticism
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation” from The Political
Unconscious
*Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies”
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
Post-colonialism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Edward Said, Orientalism
Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse"
*Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms
II. Literary Genre:
Novella and Novel
Major language traditions: English, French, Chinese, and German
A. Primary Texts
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
S. M. de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Book I)
Aphra Behn, Oronooko
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
*Voltaire, Candide
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
Ann Radcliff, Mysteries of
Udolpho
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
* Donatien Alphonse François, Count de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and My Cousin’s Corner
Window
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China” and “The Metamorphosis”
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jorge Louis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
Rider Haggard, She
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way” from In Search of Lost Time
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Pearl Buck, The Good Earth
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Toni Morrison, Sula
Chinese Fictions
Wu Ching-tzu, The Scholars
Tsao Hsueh-chin, Hung lou meng, or The Story of a Stone
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life
Liu E, The Travels of Lao Tsan
Li Pao-jia, Panorama of Officialdom
Wu Wo-yao, Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Twenty Years
Tseng Pu, Flowers in a Sinful Sea
Lu Xun, A Madman’s Diary
Chien Chung-shu, Fortress Besieged
B. Criticism
Anonymous, An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding
*Anna Letita Aikin Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-writing” from The British Novelist
Gyorgy Lukács, Studies in European Realism (Introduction and chapter I)
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” and “Preface to The American”
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer” and “The Storyteller”
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (chap.1, 14 & 18)
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Roland Barthes, S/Z
*Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”
Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do that Film Can’t (and Vice Versa)”
Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel
III. Period: 1745 to
1830
Late Enlightenment =
the Age of Sensibility + Romanticism
A: Primary Texts
Fiction
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Sarah Fielding, The Governess, or, Little Female Academy
*Voltaire, Candide
*Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of
the World
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
J-H Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia
* Donatien Alphonse François, count de Sade, Justine, or
the Misfortunes of Virtue
William Godwin, Caleb Williams or Things as They Are
Ann Radcliff, Castles of Athlin and Dunblayne
Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”
*Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
The brothers Grimm, Fairy Tales
Prose
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introduction to The Science of
Knowledge
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Adam Smith, From The Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”
Clara Reeve, The Progress to Romance
*William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
*Anna Letita Aikin Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of
Novel-writing” from The British Novelist
Poetry
Jacques Delille, “My Net Product” and “In Praise of Coffee”
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
William Blake, The Book of Thel
William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” and “Simon Lee”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Phantom or Fact” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
J?nos Bats?nyi, “On the Changes in France”
Victor Hugo, “A la Colonne de la Place Vendâme” and “The Bourgeois”
Alphonse de Lamartine, “The Lake”
George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto I & IV)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
John Keats, “Ode to the Nightingale” and “Ode on Melancholy”
Johann Christian Holderlin, “To the Fate”
Drama
Voltaire, The Orphan of China
Arthur Murphy, The Englishman from Paris
*Carlo Gozzi, Turandot
Friedrich Schiller, Cabal and Love
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
B. Critical Works
Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”
*Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and
Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
Anne K. Mellor, “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism: The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley”
David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt
Against Theory
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837
*Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
*David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change
Theodore Adorno, “The Essay as Form”
*Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”
Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century:
Construction of Femininity
John Barnell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of
Knowledge
*Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
IV. Special Area:
Mapping of Desire and Desiring as Mapping: Imperialism and The Organization of Knowledge
This project attempts to compare the political implications of the Enlightenment and Romantic representations of the Other. I see the eighteenth century as the mirror stage for modern Europe. The acts of mapping the world through writing call into being on the individual level, the concept of modern self and on a collective level, the hierarchy of spaces that point to European supremacy. My study is a historical inquiry into the gradual and cumulative effect of EuropeÅfs discovery of the world and its cognitive re-mapping of the suddenly expanded world in literary and philosophical texts. In this project, I will look into the following questions: What kind of literary forms emerge as devices for mapping the world? How does cognitive mapping affect cultural interactions or even the emergence of culture and nation as autonomous categories? How do the structures of hierarchical interdependence between Europe and its Others in imperialism take shape? Are there similarities between the structure of imperialism and the organizing structure of modern knowledge? Instead of taking the conceptual categories of self and Other for granted, the project will examine the reiterated casting of Self/Other in the acts of representations and how they are essential to the modern order of things.
Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator or World in the Moon
Montesquieu, Persian Letters
*Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World
Sir William Chambers, An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-qua of Quang-chew-fu, Gent
William Blake, “The Mental Traveller”
William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude”
Alexander W. Kinglake, Eothen
Gérard de Nerval, Journey to the Orient
Charles Baudelaire, “The Journey”
Voltaire, “A Conversation with a Chinese” and “Plato’s dream”
James Cawthorn, “Essay on Taste”
Donatien Alphonse François, count de Sade, “The Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man” and *”The Misfortunes of Virtue.”
Samuel Johnson, History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Halls”
Charles Baudelaire, “The Exposition Universelle, 1855”
*Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language”
Johann Christian Holderlin, “To the Fate”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages (chap. 1, 11 & 20)
Johann Gottfried Herder, The Outline of a Philosophy of
the History of Man
*Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
*Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
*Georg W. F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of Art
Eliza Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo
Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad
Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas
*Carlo Gozzi, Turandot
Horace Walpole, “Mi Li, a Chinese Fairy Tale”
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
*Mary Shelley, Matilda
Giacomo Puccini, Turandot
Edward Said, “Traveling Theory”
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes its Object
Lydia H. Liu, Introduction to Translingual Practice
Lawrence Venuti, “Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities”
Syrine Chafic Hout, Viewing Europe from the Outside
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
Basil Guy, The French Image of China Before and After
Voltaire
James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar
Lennard J. Davis, “The Fact of Events and the Event of Facts: New World Explorers and the Early Novel”
*Edward Said, Orientalism
Suzanne Byrl Gibson, “The Oriental Tales of Haywood, Sheridan, and Knight”
Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map (chapter 7)
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I”
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (chapter I and IV)
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”
Tim Brennan, “The National Longing for Form”
Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body
Neil Mckendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society
*David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Culture Logic of Late Capitalism (chap. 1, 2, 5, & 6)
(List for Ching-Ling Wo. Approved Fall 2000)