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, among others. 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. This course is designed as a reflection on a theoretical concept (that of affinity and relationality), but understands itself also as a theory workshop, i.e. a space for the hands-on analysis, discussion, rewriting, and contestation of theoretical texts.