An Historical Introduction (Course no. 44801)-M.A. course
Hebrew University English Dept.
First-year M./A. seminar 2004-20005 Prof. L. Besserman
Semesters A & B Tues. 14.30-16:00 room [to be announced]
Literary Criticism: An Historical Introduction (Course no. 44801)
Required Text (a copy is on reserve in the Mt. Scopus Library):
§ Adams, Hazard, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, 2nd ed. (Orlando, Fl: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1992). [PN 86/A32/1992-1094658]
Course Description:
The course offers a broad survey of literary criticism and theory from antiquity to the beginning of the modern period, with special emphasis on the early-modern and modern English tradition. Among the authors, approaches, and schools of criticism to be studied are all or most of the following: Plato, Aristotle, classicism (Horace, Longinus), neoclassicism (Dryden, Pope, Burke, Johnson), medieval allegorical and exegetical theories (Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Boccaccio), Renaissance humanism (Sidney), Romanticism and post-Romantic theories (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Emerson, Arnold, Wilde), neo-Aristotelianism (Crane), New Criticism (Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt and Beardsley), Hermeneutics (Hirsch), and Myth/Anthropological (Frye, Burke).
Requirements:
Completion of weekly reading assignments, participation in class discussion, and submission of weekly one-paragraph writing assignments (50%); a working paper (8-10 pgs.) (50%). (Optional: a seminar paper.)
Some useful secondary sources (on reserve in the Mt. Scopus library):
§ Bate Walter Jackson. Prefaces to Criticism. NY, 1959 [PN 86/B38]
§ Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. NY, 1963 (bibliography, pp. 317-57) [PN 45/W36/1956]
§ Wimsatt, William K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. NY, 1957; rpt. 1967. [PN 85/W757]