ENGL 4540 - Undoing the Sign: Theory, History and the Human

(crosslisted)
(also COML 4153) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

C. Caruth.

This course addresses issues emerging from contemporary literary theoretical debates, with particular attention to structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and emerging issues in queer theory, animal studies, political theory, and the interdisciplinary study of trauma and testimony. Readings by Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Robert Esposito, Barbara Johnson, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Shoshana Felman, and others. We will explore questions pertaining to the sign and signification, writing and the trace, rhetoric and figuration, temporality and history, and sexuality and the human.