ENGL 606 (Section 001, Schedule #34029)
Virginia Commonwealth University
Spring 2018
Th 7:00-9:40pm :: Hibbs 308
Prof. David Golumbia
Office: 324D Hibbs Hall
Spring 2018 Office Hours: MW 3:00-4:00pm; Th 6:00-7:00pm

Literary Criticism: Background Texts

Note: students are responsible for researching the texts listed here and locating copies of ones they get assigned to review. However, please contact the instructor if you have trouble in this effort.

Week Four. Fleming, Cultural Graphology

• Thurs Feb 8.
• Plato, Phaedrus and Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy"
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression and "Freud and the Scene of Writing"
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
• Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
• Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance assigned to MEGHAN KERN

Week Five. Culp, Dark Deleuze & Crary, 24/7

• Thurs Feb 15.
  • Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, "#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," and Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Politics
  • Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War and This Is Not a Program assigned to KATIE BROOKS and BRANDIE GRAY
  • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousands Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (selections, including "Introduction: Rhizome," Chapters 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 15) assigned to JANE HARWELL
  • Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image assigned to KATIE BROOKS and BRANDIE GRAY

Week Six. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs

• Thurs Feb 22.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
  • George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
  • Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract assigned to EMILY SLOAN
  • Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
  • Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature

Week Seven. Sharpe, In the Wake:

• Thurs Mar 1.
  • Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
  • C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution assigned to ANNIE PERSONS
  • Sylvia Wynter, "The Ceremony Must Be Found," "The Ceremony Found," "Beyond the Categories of the Master Conscription," "Beyond the Word of Man," "On Disenchanting Discourse," "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom"
  • Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture assigned to MALCOLM LENORE

Week Nine. Chen, Animacies

• Thurs Mar 15. Mel Chen, Animacies
  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet assigned to KAYLEIGH CONNER
  • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subveresion of Identity assigned to LEE HODGE
  • Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Week Ten. Cooper, Life as Surplus

• Thurs Mar 22. Melissa Cooper, Life as Surplus
  • Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown assigned to AJ WHITE
  • Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and "The Birth of Biopolitics" (in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth)
  • Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978
  • Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive assigned to MICHAEL DRAKE

Week Eleven. Morrison, The Origin of Others

• Thurs Mar 29. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others
  • Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination assigned to KELLY FENWICK
  • Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza assigned to PAIGE DEANS
  • Jacques Derrida, writings on the other: "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," "The Ear of the Other," Monolingualism of the Other

Week Thirteen. Fisher, Capitalist Realism

• Thurs Apr 12. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
  • Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature assigned to KAITLIN HARRIS
  • Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
  • Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism assigned to TESSA CORYN SOLEE
  • Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

Week Fourteen. Robbins, The Beneficiary

• Thurs Apr 19. Bruce Robbins, The Beneficiary
  • Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
  • Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism assigned to APRIL SOPKIN
  • Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
  • Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

Last updated February 6, 2018.