ENGL661 Wikia

## A Word of Welcome

This is the course wiki for ENGL 661 Literary Criticism and Interpretation at CSU, Chico. This wiki constitutes a major component of our work as we trace several theoretical currents that shape the understanding of literature, language, culture, and self. Specifically, we will focus on the foundational issues of meaning and pleasure. Rather than approach the variety of texts we'll be encountering as passive spectators, this wiki is a chance for us as a community to actively enjoy and make meaning together. [For help getting started using Wikia, you can visit the Help pages, here.]

CSU, Chico stands on traditional Mechoopda Indian tribal lands.
Without them and other native peoples, we would not have access to this campus
or our education.

## Other Information

Editor Bios

Author Pages

Miscellaneous Materials

Past Wiki Pages

## Guiding questions

We will pursue a set of guiding questions to help us engage, utilize, and critique the varied ways scholars have understood what it means to “make meaning” and “take pleasure” in literary texts and cultural objects. Our evolving answers to these questions constitute the learning objectives of the course.

* What relationships are there between what we find meaningful and what we enjoy?
* How does thinking about the conjunction of meaning and pleasure help us say something about the work of English studies?
* Who is included or excluded from making meaning and/or taking pleasure?
* How do recent developments in theory and criticism extend, complicate, or counter previous accounts of meaning or pleasure?

## Required texts, materials, & technology

* Chico State Wildcat email and Google Drive account
* Device with internet access
* Texts are available via pdf, web link, or library database link
* Recommended text: *The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Third Edition*. Eds. Murfin and Ray. 2008. (Culler's, *Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction* and Bronner's *Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction* - both from Oxford Uni Press - are also very good resources.)

## A word about this Wiki thing

This Wiki is more than a supplement to our time reading and discussing course texts. The wiki builds and extends our asynchronous collaboration through discussion forums and through editing wiki pages. It is also a laboratory space in which we try on and work through ideas that emerge from our course readings and through our discussions. The wiki is also a kind of public space; thus, our working-through together takes place openly. Collaboration, experimentation, and openness thus constitute three core values of our work this semester. Ultimately, these core values signal that our work in the course exists as makers of meaning instead of as passive consumers of texts that act upon us.

## A word about approaching theoretical texts

I am excited about this course, and I hope that you will find it compelling and exciting as well. The texts we will be reading are challenging (to say the least), and require careful and repeated engagement. Here are some habits and attitudes that will serve you well this semester.

* Though I state this elsewhere, it bears repeating: read each text several times, being sure to carefully and thoughtfully annotate while you read.
* Also, be okay with uncertainty. Uncertainty and its more threatening cousin, confusion, can be highly productive states of mind. But for your uncertainty and confusion to be productive, you have to note them, voice them, and work at them.
* Play the “believing game” and avoid rushing to judgment – both in reading and in your writing. Avoid outright dismissing a seemingly “wrong” idea. In the words of Peter Elbow, “try to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter: not just listening to views different from [your] own and holding back from arguing with them; not just trying to restate them without bias; but actually trying to believe them [. . . . Use] believing as a tool to scrutinize and test.”
* Conversely, don’t be afraid to challenge the ideas, thinkers, and movements we encounter. Play the “doubting game” with them once you’ve tried them on and worked to understand them.
* Working with challenging texts need not be framed in terms of like/dislike or doubt/belief. Here's a statement to that effect that works at a productive tangent to some of the language above about "doubting" and "believing." Adam Kotsko writes, "Personally, I have always felt that the very least interesting thing you can do with an author or a text is agree or disagree with them, and I see [his] work as a set of tools to think with and problems to think through, rather than a doctrine to accept or reject." Kotsko is writing in particular about the theorist Giorgio Agamben, but I think his words are much more widely applicable.
* Finally, enjoy yourself. This course is invested in interrogating our usual divisions between and characterizations of the “serious” matters of meaning and the “frivolous” matters of pleasure. Difficult things can be pleasurable, and enjoyable things can be downright serious.

## References

1. ↑ For a fuller explication of these values in the context of the Digital Humanities, see Lisa Spiro, "'This is Why We Fight': Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities." *Debates in the Digital Humanities*, 2012 edition. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13
2. ↑ Peter Elbow, "The Believing Game--Methodological Believing," 2008. [1]https://works.bepress.com/peter\_elbow/20/download/
3. ↑ Adam Kotsko, "On doing the thing," April 15, 2020. https://itself.blog/2020/04/15/on-doing-the-thing/