How to Read Deconstructively
English 481
Spring 2003 –
Instructor: Amardeep Singh
Meets: Wednesdays
Drown 102
Instructor: Professor Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)
Email: amsp@lehigh.edu
Instructor Information
Office: 221 Drown Hall
Office Hours: Monday afternoons 1-5 (email for appointment); other days by
appointment. No meetings on Fridays.
Office phone: 610-758-4285
Cell phone: 610-730-8224 (emergencies)
Required Texts:
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Jeannette Winterson,
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Course requirements: Attendance; two short papers; longer, final paper
Syllabus
English 481 – Fall 2003
Amardeep Singh
PART I: Literary Theory (getting to deconstruction)
9/3 Week 1: Nothing outside the text
Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author" (Blackboard)
Barthes, “From Work to Text” (B)
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (B)
Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics (B)
Optional: Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard” (B)
Some Concepts and terms to look for/think about: Authorship, Work/Text, Textuality, Readerly/Writerly, Author-function, sign/signifier/signified, langue/parole, phoneme/morpheme
9/10 Week 2: Speech Acts
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words
Searle, “What is a Speech Act?” (B)
Roman Jakobsen, “Poetics and Linguistics” (B)
Some Concepts: Performative/constative, speech act, locutionary/ illocutionary/perlocutionary, phonic/rhetic/phatic utterances
9/17 No class (Deep in
9/24 Week 3: Derrida's take on speech acts
DUE: A short paper (4 pages) applying a concept from the first few weeks to reading a work of literature of your choice (think: poem, short story)
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc
J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature excerpt (B)
Miller, “The Critics as Host” (B)
10/1 Week 4: Difference
Derrida, Writing and Difference (3 or 4 chapters)
M.H. Abrams, “How to Do Things With Texts” (B)
Optional: Derrida excerpts from Of Grammatology (B)
Optional: Gaytri Spivak: preface to "Grammatology" (B)
Some concepts: Difference/Differance, alterity
10/8 Week 5: Postcolonial/Poststructural
Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: “Literature,” “Culture,” and
“Appendix”
Recommended: Beaudelaire’s poem, “Le Cygne,” Kipling’s short story “William the Conqueror, Mahashweta Devi’s short story “Pterodactyl”
Also recommended: knowledge of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Some concepts: Postcolonial/poststructural, Subalternity, the Other,
Native informant, Worlding, postcolonial revisions, globality,
multiculturalism
PART II: From Literature to Literary Criticism (‘applied’ deconstruction)
10/15 Week 6: Sex, Lies, and Painting
Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Roland Barthes on Images/desire
Eve Sedgwick, “Nationalisms and sexualities,” from Tendencies (B)
Ellis Hanson on Wilde, from Decadence and Catholicism (B)
Joseph Litvak, brief excerpt on the “sophisticated” from Strange Gourmets
Some concepts: the Gaze, fetishization, the sexual closet as a fact of language, queer orientalism, eroticization of Wilde’s Catholicism
10/22 Week 7: Repetition, alienation, everyday life
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot,
Beckett, Endgame (B)
Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” (B)
De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life excerpt (B)
Assorted Beckett criticism: David Lloyd, Declan Kiberd
10/29 Week 9: Fruits and shells
DUE: a short paper (4 pages) interpreting Winterson, Beckett, or Wilde
Jeannette Winterson,
John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell excerpts (B)
Judith Butler Gender Trouble excerpt (B)
Some concepts: Khora, religion/deconstruction, eroticism/divinity
11/5 Week 10: The Ends of the Earth
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Edward Said on Conrad, from Culture and Imperialism (B)
Recommended: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
11/12 Week 11: Hybridity, Nationalism
The Satanic Verses
Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” and “The Other Question” (B)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities excerpts (B)
Some Concepts: Hybridity, migration, community, nationalism, stereotype
11/19 Week 12: Postmodernity
The Satanic Verses
Fredric Jameson, essay on Postmodernism (B)
Kwami Anthony Appiah: "Postmodern and Postcolonial" (B)
Concepts: Postmodernity, Postmodernism, pastiche/bricolage/remix
11/25 No class – Thanksgiving
12/3 Week 13: Simulacra, hyperreality, the network society
The Satanic Verses
Jean Baudrillard, on the "simulacrum"
Umberto Eco, "Travels in Hyperreality"
Optional: The Matrix
Optional: Essays from William Irwin, ed. The Matrix and Philosophy
Concepts: simulacrum, hyperreality, virtuality
Final papers (12-14 pages) due around 12/10
In class August 27: Quotes from M.H. Abrams, defining deconstruction etc.
Some terms:
Movements in literary criticism (context)
Hermeneutics
See Abrams entry
New criticism
See Abrams entry
Structuralism/semiotics, Deconstruction, post-structuralism
See Abrams on Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure
Diachronic/synchronic
Arbitrariness of the signifier
Langue/parole (or performance/competence)
Phonology/morphology (phoneme/morpheme)
Structuralism
See Abrams entry on Semiotics
Signs: Signifier + Signified
See Abrams entry on Structuralism
See Abrams entry on Deconstruction
Phonocentric, logocentric
Presence
Ecriture (French: writing)
Différance (neologism: differing + deferring)
Aporia
See Abrams entry on Speech Act Theory
J.L. Austin
Speech Act
Illocutionary
Performative
Perlocutionary