Literary Theory and Literary Criticism

By Prof. Aysha Iqbal | IIT Madras

Learners enrolled: 1231

ABOUT THE COURSE:
The course presents an overview of major trends in literary criticism and literary theory. It traces the key topics in these domains beginning from the classical times of Aristotle, Plato and Longinus till more recent theoretical trends, such as film studies, gender studies and Eco criticism.

Summary

Course Status :	Completed
Course Type :	Core
Language for course content :	English
Duration :	8 weeks
Category :	Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit Points :	2
Level :	Postgraduate
Start Date :	25 Jul 2022
End Date :	16 Sep 2022
Enrollment Ends :	08 Aug 2022
Exam Date :	25 Sep 2022 IST

Note: This exam date is subject to change based on seat availability. You can check final exam date on your hall ticket.

Page Visits

Course layout

Lecture 1

Classical/ Neo Classical Theory I

Greek and Roman models with an emphasis on classical qualities

Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus

Theories of Drama, Poetry and Style

Lecture 2

Classical/ Neo Classical Theory II

Early Modern-Enlightenment (Philip Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Locke, Addison, Hume)

Ars Poetica, Sublimity and the Satire

Lecture 3

Romanticism I

Early Nineteenth Century Romanticism

French and German Romanticism

Schiller, Stael

Kant and Hegel

Kant Critique of Judgement

Lecture 4

Romanticism II

English and American Romanticism

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Poe

Poetic Diction, Fancy and Imagination

Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) Biographia Literaria (1817)

William Hazlitt “On Poetry in General”

Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (1970)

Lecture 5

Late Nineteenth Century

Realism and Naturalism

Eliot, Zola, Henry James

Symbolism and Aestheticism

Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Wilde

Art for Art's Sake

Arnold and the Touchstone Method

Objective Correlative, Dissociation of Sensibility, Impersonality of Art

Lecture 6

Marxism

Marx, Engels

Dialectical Materialism, Economic Determinism

Manifesto, Das Kapital

Lukacs, The novel and socialist realism,

Ideology

Althusser/Gramsci- Power/Control; Rule/HegemonyEagleton

Frankfurt School; Adorno, W. Benjamin

Lecture 7

Twentieth Century Criticism

Formalism and New Criticism

Brooks, Well Wrought Urn, Irony as a Principle of Structure

Paul de Man, Eliot, A Tate

J C Ransom, The New Criticism

Will Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

The Chicago School, R S Crane

Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Bakhtin, Jacobson

Defamiliarization, foregrounding, syuzhet/fabula

Prague Linguistic Circle

Lecture 8

Structuralism

Jean Piaget on “ Structure”

Saussure, Barthes

Lang/Par, synchro/diachronic analysis, syntagmatic/paradigm

Strauss - Mythologies

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics

Prague linguistic circle

Jakobson, Trubetskoy, Rene Wellek

Lecture 9

Archetypal Criticism

Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry

Frazer, The Golden Bough

Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

C G Jung, Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Characters, Narratives, Symbols

Lecture 10

Psychoanalysis

Freud, Jung, Lacan

The Interpretation of Dreams, complexes, defences, psychosexual stages and levels

Hamlet Psychoanalysed

Lacan, Jung and deviance from Freud

Metaphor, Metonymy

Lecture 11

Gender and Queer Theory

Woolf A Room of One's Own, Gilbert and Gubar, Beauvoir, Showalter, Kristeva, Cixous, Mulvey

Ecriture Feminine, Gynocriticism, Literary Paternity

Radical, Liberal and Rational Feminism

Performativity, Butler Gender Trouble, Sedgwick

Queer Theory and LGBT criticism

Lecture 12

Post Structuralism

Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Barthes

Eco, The Open Work

Deconstruction

Derrida, Of Grammatology

“Differance”

Yale School

de Man, Hillis Miller

Semiology and the Rhetoric

Lecture 13

Reader Response and Reception

Husserl, Heidder, Jauss, Iser, Fish

1976 "Interpreting the Variorum", Interpretive Communities

Is There A Text in This Class

R Ingarden, The Intentional Object and the layers of strata

Lecture 14

Post Colonialism

Fanon, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Achebe

Hybridity, Liminality, Subaltern

The Wretched of the Earth, Orientalism, Black Skin White Masks

The Empire Writes Back

Barry on PoCo

Colonial Mimicry

Lecture 15

New Historicism

The New Historicism (1989)

Greenblatt, Cultural Poetics, Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987)

Foucault, Derrida and other influences

L Montrose on N.H

Renaissance Self -Fashinoning: From More to Shakespeare

British Cultural Materialism

Lecture 16

Semiotics

Charles Sanders Pierce

Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Eco, A Theory of Semiotics

Jameson, The Prison House of Language

Barthes S/Z

Lecure 17

Film Studies

Major Film Movements

Cinema and Modernism

Ideology, Character, Plot, Semiotics and Genres

Editing

Intertext

Classic and New Hollywood

Key Concepts in Film Studies

Lecture 18

Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism and Green Studies

British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism

Nature Vs. Culture debates

Energy, Entropy, Symbiosis

Anthropocentrism and Patetic Fallacy

Ecocritical Readings and Linguistic Determinism

Books and references

Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. University of Virginia Press, 2001.

Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006.

Attridge, Derek. Reading and Responsibility. Amsterdam University Press, 2011.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory: Fourth Edition (Beginnings). 4th ed., Manchester University Press, 2017.

Bennet, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Routledge, 2016.

Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics: The Basics. 4th ed., Routledge, 2022.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, editors. The Ecocriticism Reader. University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Gutting, Gary, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Jonathan, Culler. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kusch, Celena. Literary Analysis: The Basics. Routledge, 2016.

Ogden, Benjamin H. Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind. 1st ed., Routledge, 2018.

Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. 0 ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.

Terry, Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Instructor bio

Prof. Aysha Iqbal

IIT Madras

Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan is professor of film studies, drama and popular culture in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Among her several books are Behind the Scenes: Contemporary Bollywood Directors(ed.) Sage: New Delhi, 2017, Post-liberalization Indian Novels in English: Global Reception & Politics of Award London: ANTHEM, 2013. Her books on communication include English for Technical Communication, and English for Nurses and English for the Hotel Industry

Course certificate

The course is free to enroll and learn from. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the proctored exam conducted by us in person at any of the designated exam centres.

The exam is optional for a fee of Rs 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only).

Date and Time of Exams: 25 September 2022 Morning session 9am to 12 noon; Afternoon Session 2pm to 5pm.

Registration url: Announcements will be made when the registration form is open for registrations.

The online registration form has to be filled and the certification exam fee needs to be paid. More details will be made available when the exam registration form is published. If there are any changes, it will be mentioned then.

Please check the form for more details on the cities where the exams will be held, the conditions you agree to when you fill the form etc.

CRITERIA TO GET A CERTIFICATE

Average assignment score = 25% of average of best 6 assignments out of the total 8 assignments given in the course.
Exam score = 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100

Final score = Average assignment score + Exam score

YOU WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR A CERTIFICATE ONLY IF AVERAGE ASSIGNMENT SCORE >=10/25 AND EXAM SCORE >= 30/75. If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will not get the certificate even if the Final score >= 40/100.

Certificate will have your name, photograph and the score in the final exam with the breakup.It will have the logos of NPTEL and IIT Madras .It will be e-verifiable at nptel.ac.in/noc.

Only the e-certificate will be made available. Hard copies will not be dispatched.

Once again, thanks for your interest in our online courses and certification. Happy learning.

- NPTEL team

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