| Literary Criticism: Readers and their Texts - ENG 5283 - Spring 2009 | |
|
Lori Anne Ferrell, The Bible and the People |
 Rather
than a tour through the mall of literary theory, this course
will take a particular path in the history of hermeneutics.
For the mall approach, you can read a wonderfully useful
anthology entitled
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
We will be exploring some salient questions about literary
theory that pertain to
groupings of texts from the Bible to the Sookie Stackhouse
series of novels. This exploration will require
digging, and a level of attention that might seem taxing
at times. We will ask some basic questions, such as
Kermode does in his book -- "Why are some narratives obscure?"
How are things hidden in writing? Is this always a secondary effect, or
are the psychoanalysts correct that we also (1) hide things,
like the truth, from ourselves, and/or (2) refuse to see? We will also think about the ways
in which ideology impacts our capacities for clear vision.
That is, we apparently have the capacity to live a grand
illusion, and not necessarily as a
Second Life. |
 Charlaine Harris (above) was born in Mississippi in 1951. A native of the Mississippi Delta, she grew up in the middle of a cotton field. Now she lives in southern Arkansas with her husband, her three children, three dogs, and a duck. The duck stays outside. Though her early output consisted largely of ghost stories, by the time she hit college (Rhodes, in Memphis) Charlaine was writing poetry and plays. After holding down some low-level jobs, she had the opportunity to stay home and write, and the resulting two stand-alones were published by Houghton Mifflin. After a child-producing sabbatical, Charlaine latched on to the trend of writing mystery series, and soon had her own traditional books about a Georgia librarian, Aurora Teagarden. Her first Teagarden, Real Murders, garnered an Agatha nomination. -- excerpt from the official Charlaine Harris web site |