3.0

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What if the social doesn't just "contain" literature but takes its cues from it? This course will address the fundamental and ongoing questions about the way people live and the role of social practice in defining, producing, and using literature. In this course we will ask about the material production of texts; about the role of readers in appropriating them; about the alliance of literature to class and institutional settings; about the human interactions that literature models for us and their problems; and about the connection between literary studies and globalization. Rather than regard “the social” as simply a shorthand for “social problems,” and literature’s relationship to it as merely indexical or diagnostic, we will explore more complex versions of both sociality and its relationship to literature. Course materials takes up bodies of knowledge that fall in the contact zone between sociology and literary theory—Marxian hermeneutics, discourse-network theory, media studies, book history, narratology, object-oriented ontologies, and systems theory--and assess their worth for changing conversations in literary studies without rendering literary criticism obsolete. In fact, we will seriously consider the idea that literary criticism has much to say about truly complex sociological and social phenomena, and conditions of modernity, perhaps doing sociology better than sociology in its present form. Another question we will ask is if Kantian aesthetics can be reconciled with Bourdieuian sociology, studying pieces of interpretation and theory that do exactly that. Aside from many canonical sociological texts, students will be given a solid introduction to British Cultural Studies, the Frankfurt School, Poststructuralism, Affect Studies, and Book History.