564 SEMINAR LIT MODES AND GENRES, Lesser & Foote. M 3-4:50
TOPIC: Discipline or Publish: Theories of Form and Professional Developments
This course addresses some of the most fundamental aspects of our professional work as literary critics, and it aims to develop students’ understanding of and facility with both the theory and the professional practice of this work. Our theoretical focus will be the central issue in the history of literary theory, an issue which has remained constant in its appeal to a wide range of otherwise antagonistic critical schools: the theory of literary form. Through an intensive study of this theoretical history, we will also seek to chart changes in the institutional and disciplinary history of the study of literature, from its creation as a university course of study through its successive transformations in recent decades. Finally, our overriding goal is to further the professional development of graduate students by linking these theoretical and disciplinary histories to the contemporary academy and helping students to enter professional conversations in their respective areas of study. For this reason, we have designed the assignments for this seminar with the explicit goal of facilitating publication, grant applications, conference presentations, and other scholarly forms of writing.

Readings will be drawn primarily from theorists of form and genre, probably including William Empson, Georg Lukacs, Northrop Frye, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, Peter Brooks. We will consider form not only as a verbal structure but also as a material practice of printing, publishing, and reading, examining some historians of the book, print culture, and reception, probably including Meredith McGill, Janice Radway, June Howard, Roger Chartier, D.F. McKenzie, Pierre Bourdieu, and work from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Finally, we will read some histories of the profession, probably including John Guillory, Gerald Graff, some early histories of university curricula, and early issues of scholarly journals like the Kenyon Review and Scrutiny.

The work for the course will differ from the typical graduate seminar. As a preparatory assignment, each student will undertake a history of an important journal in her field by reading ten complete issues of the journal, spread across thirty years. The course will culminate not in a seminar paper, but rather in one of three possible forms, depending on the student’s interest and her position in the graduate career:

1) Students in their first or second year of graduate work will write a 10-15 page review essay, focusing on three or four recent and important books in their field, positioning these works in relation to each other and to the history of the field as understood through the 30-year journal survey;

2) Students in their second, third, or fourth year will undertake a closely directed revision of a seminar paper from a previous semester in preparation for submission to a peer-reviewed journal;

3) Students preparing for the Special Field Exam will complete and circulate a detailed dissertation prospectus of 10-15 pages, outlining the central and distinctive argument of their proposed dissertation and proceeding to a summary of the topic and tentative claims of each chapter.