This course is about ways to read, which means that it is
about the different ideas people have about how meaning comes about, how
literature works, why people tell stories, what makes one work of art better
than another, and what difference any of these things makes.
We will read a number of essays on the interpretation and
analysis of literary and cultural artifacts, and students will be introduced to
a variety of theoretical approaches to culture and to literary interpretation.
The goal is to get a clear sense of what kinds of questions the various
approaches help you to ask, to practice asking them, and to keep talking to one
another about the process of interpretation as we go through it.
Requirements:
attendance and participation
five short papers
a final exam
Major Texts
may include:
The True Story of Kaluaikoolau, As Told By His Wife,
Piilani, translated by Frances N.
Frazier
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
essays by Aristotle, Louis
Althusser, Cristina Bacchilega, Sigmund Freud, kuualoha hoomanwanui, Fredric
Jameson, Dennis Kawaharada, Claude Levi-Strauss, Laura Mulvey, Oscar Wilde
poems and short stories by Mme.
Prince de Beaumont, Angela Carter, Ted Chiang, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jakob and
Wilhelm Grimm, John Keats, Jack London, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Jack
London, Darrell Lum, Charles Perrault, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, H. G.
Wells, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth