ENG 390-01 - Literary Theory

4 credits (Spring Term 1 & Term 2)

Identity/Politics/Poetics: The Culture Wars and the Ends of Theory, 1966-1996. In this course, we will trace out the connections and disjunctions between a lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1966, Native Americans’ attempts to regain tribal status in the 1970s and 80s, a Nazi-tinged scandal in 1988, the separate obscenity trials of 2 Live Crew and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990, and a literary hoax perpetrated by a physicist in 1996. Each implicates aspects of literary or cultural theory in the hotly contested contact zone of politics, identity, and poetics that we call “the culture wars.” We will take a historicist approach to exploring the impact of post-structural theories on American culture and the academy in the 1980s and 90s. The course concludes with an exploration of what seems an intensification of culture wars rhetoric in today’s politics. To that end, we will explore the 2011 publication of the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American and the subsequent debate over who was and wasn’t included, and we will conclude with two memoirs, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt (2020). In order to tease out the cultural issues and theories that animate these encounters, we will utilize essays or chapters by Allan Bloom, Judith Butler, James Clifford, Rey Chow, Kimberle Crenshaw, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates Jr., bell hooks, Steven Knapp and Walter Michaels, Catharine MacKinnon, and Alan Sokol. Please note: this is a 15-week course divided up into two 7 ½- week 2-credit terms. For Spring 1, grades determined by class discussion, collaborative presentations, several short response papers and a 6-page final paper. For Spring 2, grade determined by collaborative group work, class discussion and a 4 ½ -week research phase to be devoted to a project or paper equivalent to 15 pages.

Prerequisite: Any 200-level English course.
Instructor: Andrews