Theories and Methodologies for Literary Studies

This course provides a grounding in key historical and contemporary debates about the nature, purpose, methods and goals of literary study. Topics to be addressed may include: the challenges involved in situating texts in their historical contexts; the question of how texts generate a plurality of meanings beyond the limits of ‘authorial intention’; critical methods for analysing how texts encode or subvert ideas about class, race, gender and sexuality; the nature of textual representation and the relation between language and reality; the nature of literary genre and the role of reader expectation; the insights of book history into changing understandings of authorship, publication, reading and criticism; the impact of digital technologies on modes of literary circulation; and the use of new digital methods to examine literary production in ways that reshape traditional categories of text and author, and raise fundamental questions about originality and the archive.