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:
The True Story
of Kaluaikoolau, As Told By His Wife, Piilani, translated by Frances N.
Frazier
Sophocles,
Oedipus the King
China
Miéville,
The City & The City
essays
by Aristotle, Louis Althusser, Matthew Arnold, Cristina Bacchilega, Noam
Chomsky, Sigmund Freud, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanwanui, Fredric Jameson, Dennis
Kawaharada, Claude Levi-Strauss, Laura Mulvey, Raymond Williams, Oscar Wilde
poems
and short stories by Mme. Prince de Beaumont, Angela Carter, Ted Chiang, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, John Keats, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Jack London,
Darrell Lum, Charles Perrault, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, William Carlos
Williams