Jonathan P. Eburne

Graduate Course: Contemporary Literary Theory

ENGL 582/ CMLIT 580

“Theory vs. Theory”

R 03:35P - 06:35P 306 BURROWES

A rash of recent scholarship and journalism presents the death of theory as both an allegory and a symptom of a frightening set of historical conditions: fiscal and ideological crises in the academic humanities, as well as the more general demise of liberalism in the contemporary global environment. Yet are current intellectual and political conditions so dire as to disrupt the very possibility for thought altogether? This course proposes instead that the forms of intellectual inquiry we know as "Theory" have always faced conditions of crisis. In fact, rather than thinking of crisis as the occasion for theory's death, its decay, or its dissolution, we will explore the extent to which theory's crises have provided its generative force. That is, we will study how theory's uneasy synthesis of unorthodox political philosophy, revisionist psychoanalysis, and avant-garde writing derives historically from moments of debate— about the epistemological and ethical stakes of intellectual discourse; about the boundaries between the humanistic and scientific disciplines; and about the relationships between the individual subject, the work of art, and the political world.

This class will historicize some of the major questions in literary and cultural theory by studying some key debates between theorists. These debates may include:

•Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Duhring

•Washington and Du Bois

•Pound, Riding, Graves, and Leavis

•Adorno and Benjamin

•Russian formalists, surrealists, and existentialists on the question

of political writing

•Althusser and E.P. Thompson

•Césaire, Depestre, and Senghor

•French and American feminisms (Cixous, Irigaray, Beauvoir;

MacKinnon, Friedan,Dworkin)

•Barthes and Picard

•Lyotard and Habermas

• new pragmatists "Against Theory"

•the Sokal affair.