24/S2 ENGL 2803 A - Contemporary Theory I

Known for his playful, paradoxical, and self-referential illustrations, MC Escher famously claimed that “We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” Theory is precisely this exercise of producing order (or an explanatory framework) from what appears at first glance to be chaos. It also sometimes involves an exercise in discerning how chaos (or violence) may be produced by our orders whether they be legal, epistemological, ethical, social, linguistic, economic, or otherwise. If you’re doing this course right, you can expect to feel “uncanny,” “bewildered,” disembodied, “intersected,” “de/constructed,” synaesthetic, and stretched or exploded across history. You will hear new frequencies, see multiplied perspectives, and feel yourself in different dimensions. The course calendar explains that the “primary concern of this course is to familiarize students with the social, political, cultural, and philosophical presuppositions of theoretical inquiry into literary texts.” However, our task is just as much about the psychedelic and liberating experience of defamiliarization. Our texts span the disciplines of philosophy, psychoanalysis, law, sociology, history, linguistics, as well as literary and cultural studies in addition to essays on craft by creative writers themselves. We will learn about a variety of subject positions along lines of gender, race, indigeneity and colonialism, dis/ability, sexuality, class, and “interpretive community” more broadly. We will explore Marxist; feminist; ecocritical; as well as Black, trans, queer, and indigenous studies perspectives. In all cases, however, we will interrogate how these critical hermeneutics do more than simply reveal diverse interpretations of world and text. In a stunning transubstantiation of mind over/into matter, these theories may also redefine the contours of the actual and the possible.