YOUR PROFESSOR

REQUIRED TEXTS

Run Lola Run (German; fem-gender; marx) Kandahar (fem) Pretty Woman (fem) Frida (fem; post-colonial) Magnolia (psych; decon; cultural) Bowling for Columbine (decon; cultural) Ma Vie En Rose (my life in pink; queer; fem/intersex) Jackie Brown (fem; marx; af. am.) Matrix (the first one; marx; post-colonial) Legally Blonde (either one; fem) Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb (decon; psych; fem) Blue (French; psych) Snow White (fem) Mulon (fem; queer/drag; cultural) Clueless (fem; cultural; marx) Fight Club (gender fem; marx; semiotics) Go Fish (lesbian; queer) The Crying Game (gay/queer; marx) Fire (fem; post-colonial; lesbian) Network (cultural; new hist) Blade Runner (cultural; marx) Being John Malkovich (cultural; psych) Ice Age (cultural) Syriana (post-colonial; cultural; marx) Gattaca (marx) Fur (fem; psych) A Passage to India (post-colonial; psych) Smoke Signals (post-colonial? decon) The Color Purple (af. am.; lesbian) Happy Texas (gay/queer) Volver (Almadovar; fem; psych) Slumdog Millionaire (post-colonial)

• Purchase ONE of the following books for your 2nd critical essay (by the way, poetry books are NOT easier):

  PROSE Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo David Sedaris's Naked Gertrude Stein's Three Lives Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name Toni Morrison's Beloved Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Kate Chopin's The Awakening Junot Diaz's Drown Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man Barry Hannah's Ray V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath Levi Peterson's The Backslider Alice Walker's The Color Purple Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping POETRY Sharon Olds' The Gold Cell Sylvia Plath's Ariel Adrienne Rich's The Dream Of A Common Language Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven Yusef Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular Langston Hughes The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Susan Howe's Stone Spirits PLAYS August Wilson's The Piano Lesson Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman Neil Labute's Bash Tony Kushner's Angels In America Part I and/or II Sarah Kane's Crave John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation Tracy Letts' August County

COURSE OBJECTIVES

In this class, you will begin to develop an understanding of literary theory which will, as Lois Tyson (our textual guru this semester) tells us, help you "get on the bus" of current English studies.  You will learn more about your own way of looking at the world, and begin to see the theories behind your "natural" assumptions and interpretations about literature and "the" self.  You will learn that theory is a conversation rather than an absolute religion--theories are more like propositions (not laws, but arguments, perhaps) that try to explain things in interesting ways (often with the attempt at simplification rather than mystification).  Literary theories are also just as colored by their situatedness in region, history, politics etc. as is a literary text (and as are you).  You will see how texts can be interpreted in numerous ways based on the "lenses" you "put on" to see that text.  You will also see that each different lens or theory can focus on an entirely different aspect of that text.  The theories we are going to cover this semester range from the traditional to the currently hot: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction Theory, New Historicism/Cultural Criticism, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Criticism, and African American Criticism.  You will be reacting to and practicing all these theories (or at least Lois Tyson's interpretations of these theories) with a number of written and visual texts, the main one being The Great Gatsby and your selected film and book-length works.

LEE'S BIASES: One thing a theorist can do before even looking at other texts is to evaluate their own biases or lenses.  I have always loved Post-Structural theories for the way they can privilege texts that experiment and avoid the myth of mere representation (e.i. realism).  As a writer who's mentors taught strangeness, I seldom like straightforward stories or movies (or television, or radio shows etc.).  I personally (but not "naturally") tend to look at the world in non-essentialist, post-structuralist ways.  In other words, there is no absolute law somewhere for me to rely on or find; there are no absolute answers; there is no definitive interpretation of a text or a life or a film; everything is relative and contextual, but not nihilistically so--to me no absolutes means there is infinite complexity rather than infinite meaninglessness.  I often can't give people answers, though, and this can be problematic.  Of course, when I'm suffering in love, everything becomes suddenly essentialistic and absolute, and thus simple (Love is Grand, for instance, or Love Sucks).  I am often also a theoretical and political feminist, but that's a very complex thing to be.  At times feminists are post-structural (gender is a construct, not an absolute), and at times feminism is political (gender bias is why women make less money, and so we need to turn the tide!).  Feminism can also be essentialistic.  French feminism, for instance, claims that good literature uses the female vagina as a model--non-linear/non-phallic, non-grammatical texts that use the "illogic" of the literal vagina and it's folds would be considered more disruptive, more interesting artistically, but also more feminine (for instance, Gertrude Stein's works would fall into this category).  French feminism is odd stuff, but it interested me as a new creative writer at BYU because it was a good excuse for writerly strangeness.  I am also often a theoretical and political queer which has many of the same complexities as "being" a feminist.  Often queer theorists talk about sexuality as a construct, not an absolute.  Other queers and scientists talk about sexuality being purely neurological.  Some queers just say sexuality biases need to be stamped out anywhere they're found because we're just "born this way".  It's quite a complex combination of lenses to see the world through, to write from within, and to read texts with.

YOUR BIASES (Identity/Ideological/Theoretical Laundry List):

 

PROFESSOR'S RULES