ENGL 7800 Studies in Critical Theory
Theory After Postmodernism: Cognitive
Science, Levinas, Kristeva
6:30–9:10 R
Donald Wehrs
This course will introduce students to three influential
currents of contemporary critical theory. Each of these new directions may be
understood as being “after postmodernism” both in the sense of having
been “prepared for” through the “theoretical” turn of
the 1970s and 80s, and in the sense of being responses to, critiques of, or
perhaps advances beyond the academic critical orthodoxies that “theory”
by the mid-1980s established in the place of earlier, New Critical academic
orthodoxies. After briefly considering the implications for literary critical
practice of critiques of signification and subjectivity inspired by Derrida,
Foucault, and Lacan in a few influential, programmatic New Historical and neo-Marxist
essays of the 1980s, the course will explore how contemporary cognitive science—comprising
convergent research in neuroscience, metaphor-categorization cognition, crosscultural
linguistics, developmental and evolutionary psychology, computer modeling, etc.—makes
possible a rethinking of questions about subjectivity, universality, mind/body
and emotion/reason connections. This rethinking motivates new ways of thinking
about the relation of literature to culture, and thus new ways of reading literary
texts. We will then explore connections between the kinds of embodied subjectivity
cognitive science puts forth and the theorizing of embodied subjectivity offered,
differently, in the writings of the ethical, phenomenological philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas (whose work became influential in literary studies in the 1990s) and
in the writings of the contemporary feminist-psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva.
Together, these three new directions in critical theory offer compelling, novel,
sometimes antagonistic, sometimes complementary accounts of subjectivity and
its relation to language, culture, and politics, and so open new
paths for literary criticism. In diverse ways, Levinas, Kristeva, and cognitive
science restore a constructive, positive role for literature—and so restore
to literature a subject distinct from the subject of other disciplines concerned
with analyzing subjective or cultural practices--even as they absorb and recontextualize
the critiques of signification and hegemony offered by postmodern philosophy
and New Historical, neo-Marxist critical practices.
In additions to works by Levinas, Kristeva, and such cognitive scientists as Antonio Damasio, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the course will explore essays in literary theory and literary criticism by Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Mary Thomas Crane, Adam Zachary Newton, David P. Haney, Melvyn New, Kelly Oliver, and Donald R. Wehrs, among others.
Requirements: a short early paper;
a longer term paper; a final exam; class participation. No previous experience
in critical theory is assumed