Teaching GuideTerm
Faculty of Philology
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Grao en Inglés: Estudos Lingüísticos e Literarios
  English Literature and Literary Criticism
Topic Sub-topic
1. Concepts
1.1 What is literature? And English literature? 1.2 What is Literary Theory? What is it for?1.3 Writers and critics: who does the text belong to? 1.4 Validation: the literary canon. 1.5 Mediation agents (audiences, publicity, translators, critics, scholars, etc). 1.6 Centre and periphery: standards y alternatives. 1.7 A brief view of the history of literary theory: from Matthew Arnold, the Cambridge critics and the New Critics up to ecocriticism.
2. Text, author and reader 2.1 "Meaning" and "significance" (Hirsch)
2.2 Objectivity: authorial intention and reception. Is the author dead?
2.3 Open / closed (Eco).
2.4 Related sources: I. A Richards, Hirsch, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, W. Iser, Wayne C. Booth, Estructuralismo, Stanley Fish.
3. The authorial persona 3.1 Implied authors and narrators. A study of the processes of communication. Tellability. Identity. Narrators and narratees. Voice and point of view.
3.2 Poetic voice and alter ego.
3.3 Playwrights and their characters (the problem of satire in the theatre)
3.4 Drama and the theatre: performance texts.
3. 5 Sources: E. M. Forster and E. Muir on the novel; Wayne C. Booth and the Chicago School; Speech Act theories (Grice and M- L- Pratt in particular); Chatman's and Genette's studies on narratology.
4. Form and content. The literary language 4.1 Does a literary language exist?
4.2 Does form mean? Is literature useful? Fiction/Non fiction.
4.3 Semiotics: Saussure and Peirce.
4.4 Metaphor, metonymy: a structuralist explanation of modernism and realism.
4.5 Phonocentrism: from Structuralism to Poststructuralism. Text as communication or pleasure.
4.6 Sources: Liberal humanists, Formalists and Marxists, Fowler, Lodge, Deconstruction, Barthes.
5. Text, history, culture and nature 5.1 Historiography and the historical novel.
5.2 The universal versus the contextual.
5.3 The concepts of culture and ideology.
5.4 Gender: theories and evolution. Gay studies.
5.6 Power and subversion: Foucault and the discursive surveillance of the State. Historicism and Cultural Materialism.
5.7 National/linguistic identity. Postcolonialism versus Eurocentrism.
5.8 Nature: ecocriticism.
5.9 Hayden White, Eagleton, Dollimore, Bakhtin, Said.
6. Literary analysis from different perspectives. 6.1 Reading Aphra Behn's The Rover
6.2 Reading Conrad's Heart of Dakness
6.3 Various extracts from a few sources (photocopies or pdfs)