THIS COURSE SAME AS 195:301:01 AND 988:396:03

IThis course will introduce students to several traditions in twentieth-century thought that have been very important to the study of literature, including poems, novels, and plays but also film, modern media, dreams, and ritual practices of all types.  We will read arguments from linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and many intellectuals who are difficult to classify but whose ideas have become central to how we think about “literature” and about many other problems: about language, about how we make meaning, about images and advertising, about myths and society, about our identities and our sense of community.  We will read selections from key intellectual paradigms, including structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, historicism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory.  Authors will include Saussure, Benveniste, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, Fanon, Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Rubin, De Lauretis, and Butler.  In addition to the readings, we will watch four films, which will be screened separately.  The course will be taught at an accessible, introductory level and is open to students in any department—there is literally no major on campus to which this material isn’t relevant!