Handbook

Animated by the question of what it means to study literature today, this course aims to stimulate a spirit of adventure in one’s approaches to literary and cultural texts. Theory, understood in its original Greek sense of theorein - ‘a way of seeing’ - serves as our compass for analyzing the myriad ways that meaning can emerge from literary and visual signs. The course takes you through the principal methods of the literary critical tradition, such as feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and deconstruction. You will also have the chance to put these methods into practice, enlivening them with ideas of embodiment, materiality, sexuality, power, representation, ideology, and many others. Providing a solid foundation for future higher degree research, the goal of the course is not only to expose you to some influential currents in the ways people have thought about literature, but also for you to pirate these theories for your own theoretical exploits in a daring programme of critical inquiry, fashioning new ways of seeing and reading the ever-changing sign systems of the contemporary world.