COML 4999 - Seminar in Theory

(LA-AS)      

This course examines trends and issues in contemporary literary and cultural theory, with attention to structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, postcolonial theory, media theory, and ecocritical/animal studies approaches. In order to build a theoretical foundation for practices of comparison, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which different theories imagine connection and relation: between world and word, subject and object, self and other, human and animal. Readings include works by Ferdinand de Saussure, Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, and others.