As Donald E. Hall suggests in Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications, Marxist analysis includes eight key principles: attention to material conditions to achieve positive social change; the traditional social structure is based on the oppression of workers; social classes ultimately have conflicting interests; literary and cultural texts are ideological in background, form, and function; the production and consumption of texts reflect class ideologies; representations within texts reflect class ideologies; production, consumption, and content of criticism is ideological in nature; and a key role of the critic is to further class awareness and positive social change (76-81).
donald e hall literary and cultural theory
Hall, Donald E. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 73-81. This reference book offers insight into various literary and cultural theories of applied criticism. The chapter on Marxist and Materialist analysis provides a new critical writer with the necessary background and key principles to aid in understanding the approach and applying it to literary texts.
* examines all of the major methodologies and theoretical emphases of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including psychoanalytic criticism, materialism, feminism and queer theory * applies the theories discussed in detailed readings of literary and cultural texts, from novels and poetry to film and the visual arts * offers a unique perspective on our current obsession with perfecting our selves * looks to the future of selfhood given the new identity possibilities arising out of developing technologies.
Examining some of the most exciting issues confronting cultural critics and readers today, Subjectivity is the essential introduction to a fraught but crucial critical term and a challenge to the way we define our selves.
The course focuses on critical theory as it applies to literature and culture. We will also be exploring strategies for publishing and/or presenting academic material. Review of classical Greek origins of issues concerning the nature of literature and criticism. Study of major twentieth-century theories and applications: historical, formalist, archetypal, psychoanalytic, Marxist, reader-response, New Historicist, feminist, postcolonial, American multicultural, structuralist and various post-structuralist perspectives.
* examines all of the major methodologies and theoretical emphases of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including psychoanalytic criticism, materialism, feminism and queer theory* applies the theories discussed in detailed readings of literary and cultural texts, from novels and poetry to film and the visual arts* offers a unique perspective on our current obsession with perfecting our selves * looks to the future of selfhood given the new identity possibilities arising out of developing technologies.
Examining some of the most exciting issues confronting cultural critics and readers today, Subjectivity is the essential introduction to a fraught but crucial critical term and a challenge to the way we define our selves.
A major characteristic of the program is the interface of the studies of literature, cultural history, and media. Haruo Shirane is an expert in classical, medieval and early modern Japanese literature and cultural history, with special interest in poetry and prose fiction, intermedial relations (oral storytelling, painting/print culture, dance, and theater in relationship to literary texts), and the role of popular culture in canon formation. David Lurie, teaching both literature and history, is a leading authority in ancient Japanese history and literature, script and writing systems, linguistic thought, and Japanese myths. In premodern studies, they are aided by Wei Shang (premodern Chinese literature), Michael Como, Bernard Faure, and Max Moerman (early and medieval Japanese religion), and Matthew McKelway (medieval and Edo painting).
Paul Anderer is an authority on 20th century Japanese literature, particularly fiction, literary criticism, and film. Tomi Suzuki is an expert in 19th and 20th century fiction, literary and cultural criticism, and intellectual history. They are complemented by Carol Gluck, Greg Pflugfelder, and Paul Kreitman (19th and 20th c. Japanese history), Jonathan Reynolds (modern Japanese visual culture and architecture), and Marilyn Ivy (anthropology), not to mention those in other modern East Asian literatures and cultural studies, particularly Theodore Hughes (modern Korean literature) and Lydia Liu (modern Chinese and literature).
This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to key themes in contemporary feminist thought. Attention will be devoted to how the intersections of race, gender, class, nation and sexuality, as well as the politics of deviance, shape feminist theory. This course aims to introduce students to key theoretical contributions of feminist thought. The course emphasizes an understanding of feminist theories through the political, historical and cultural contexts in which they developed. Topics covered will include the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies through cultural productions, public polices and technology; Marxist feminism; postcolonial feminism; transnational and diasporic practices; politics of representation and queer theory. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor.
This graduate seminar will examine theories on territory, and their relation to affective constructs regarding social bodies, race, gender, sexuality, and religious acts. We will examine a number of issues related to spatial theory, affect theory, and performance. We will study the constructions of territory, affect, and performances of race and gender as historically and geographically situated phenomena. How are territory and affect racialized or gendered? What can affect theory bring to the geographical imagination, and how do geopolitical fantasies shape imaginaries of distance, nearness, foreignness, and self? We will engage a comparative lens and examine these issues across processes of globalization, migration, cultural production and circulation, and infrastructural changes of cartographic constructs such as East/West, Transpacific, circum-Altantic, and the Global South.
From slave narratives to science fiction, Afrofuturist art contests the boundaries of the real. Otherworldly visions, tales from the underground, sounds from the future, and alien bodies recur in Black literature, music, visual art, and performance. What is it about the Black experience that solicits the unreal? This course examines the speculative, futurist, and fantastic in African American literature and the arts. Drawing on a range of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century literary and cultural production, we will explore the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and the afterlives of slavery.
As all well-read Victorianists know, this is a topic highly suitable for a journal devoted to studies in nineteenth-century prose. We still have much to learn from writers who are often regarded from the safe distance of a century or more, who are packaged in anthologies and processed through our critical reading and writing machines. Many examples come to mind (I often quote Carlyle to tardy contributors and sluggish colleagues), but my particular concern in the following pages is the applicability to the production of literary and cultural critique today of some of the most incisive Victorian commentary on production: that of John Ruskin. 2ff7e9595c
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