Steven Wexler
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English 436-01: Major Critical Theories
Summer 2009
Jerome Richfield Hall 319
T W R 2:00 - 4:30
Office Hours: T W 11:00 - 12:00
WebCT: https://webteach.csun.edu

Books:
Murray. Classical Literary Criticism
Rivkin and Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology
(see suggested readings below)

Let’s get theoretical.
 Where is the author in the polyphonic novel?  What came first, the Oedipus complex or Sophocles?  If Shakespeare invented the human, what is multiculturalism?  Does the death of man include the cyborg?  What do the English gentleman and coffee house have to do with British literacy and nationalism?  Why would Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky call Tristram Shandy “the most typical novel”—I mean, have you read this book?  Gender is a social construction, but sex too?

The answers to these questions might be found in critical theory and literary criticism, including new criticism, new historicism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, and Marxism.  We'll consider theory's beautiful and daunting language with a transhistorical approach to the subject.  We'll leap across time, text, genre, and continent while never leaving our postmodern condition.  Readings include representative works from classical antiquity through the Enlightenment to postmodernity. 
 
Class Projects:
  • WebCT Posts (weekly)
  • Five Short Analyses  
  • Group Presentation
  • Final Essay
  • Blog
1.  WebCT
Each week, post an informal yet thoughtful response to our readings and class discussion on our WebCT page. This reflection is a very important part of our coursework and a great opportunity for you to establish a meaningful dialogue with your classmates since they will post there, too.  I don’t count words, but I do look for clear, convincing reflections in a conversational tone.  Make connections to our texts, your classmates, and things outside the class; go beyond summarizing. 

2.  Analyses
These short papers (250-500 words, not including Works Cited) ask that you apply a theoretical movement discussed in class to a specific primary text.  This text may or may not be provided by me.  Avoid summarizing your primary text and instead illuminate our critical theory by demonstrating how the theory explains the text.  Draw from our books, supplemental readings, and class discussions. The analyses should include:  
  • A logical flow of ideas with unified paragraphs and effective transitions
  • Effective incorporation of research materials, primary text(s), and other texts
  • MLA documentation including Works Cited page
3.  Group Presentation
In groups of three or four lead a 30-minute class discussion on a theoretical movement, e.g., formalism.   Please note that your presentation is a discussion not alecture. Help your classmates makes sense of the theory’s historical context (e.g., when the movement emerged and why), the cultural import (e.g., how the theory’s reception influenced literature or education), and/or the theory’s practical uses.  Your group must do the following:
  • Design a classroom activity
  • Each individual must contribute to her/his group activity and post a 250-word reflection on that contribution to WebCT.  Your reflection will tell your classmates and me how you contributed to your group presentation.

4.  Final Essay 
Your final, seven-page essay (not including Works Cited) asks that you master one major theory and apply that theory to a novel or film.  Go beyond one theorist and one theoretical strand and locate convincing secondary sources, e.g., academic journal articles.  This final essay should demonstrate a mastery of a particular movement in critical theory and a sophisticated grasp of academic discourse.  Much like your shorter analyses, this longer essay should represent careful scholarly work. 

5. Blog
During the first week of class, create a blog devoted to critical theory. NOTE: Your blog is important!  You’ll have all of your work posted on your blog; your classmates will read your blogs as will scholars across the world doing research on critical theory and/or items related to theory.  Since this is your personal blog, it will be tempting to write informally, as if you’re chatting to a friend. All of your major writings, however, must meet high academic standards including a formal tone. But feel free to be creative; experiment with new media!


Grades
I grade holistically. Your assignments will receive comments, suggestions, and a grade range, e.g., "A-/B+". Your final grade will come at the semester's end, once your work is assessed in its entirety. Please feel free to come by my office, email, or phone me if you have concerns at any time during the semester.  NOTE: it is most important that you check your email throughout the semester.

Attendance
This is a short summer session and attendance is absolutely necessary.  Please do not come late to class since repeated late arrivals will count as a full absence.  You cannot pass this course if you miss more than two classes, miss an assignment, or plagiarize.

Academic Honesty
You must be scrupulously honest in documenting the work that you have drawn from others.  Like other institutions, CSUN maintains a strict academic honesty policy.  Plagiarism is illegal and dishonest.  All cases of academic dishonesty must be reported to the Dean, who may suspend or permanently dismiss you from CSUN.  You will receive a course grade of F if you plagiarize in E436.

Summer 2009 E436 Syllabus
Course requirements and policies are subject to change; not all readings and assignments are represented below.  Please consult our online syllabus at http://www.csun.edu/~swexler/e436summer09.html.  Work is due on the date it appears.  Each week requires a WebCT post prior to class.

7/8   Introductions: Let’s Get Theoretical
Syllabus and Course Overview
Form discussion groups

7/9 Greek Antiquity
Murray. Classical Literary Criticism
"Introduction"
Plato. Ion
Plato. Republic 2, 3, 10

7/14 Greek Antiquity (cont’d)
Murray. Classical Literary Criticism
Aristotle. Poetics
Longinus. On the Sublime

7/15   Greek Antiquity (cont’d)
DUE: Group Presentation #1 (Classical Literary Criticism)
DUE: Analysis #1 (Classical Literary Criticism)

7/16 Formalism
Rivkin. Rivkin, “Introduction: ‘Formalisms’”
Rivkin.  Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

7/21 Formalism (cont’d)
Rivkin.  Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
Rivkin.  Bakhtin, “Rabelais and His World”
 
7/22  Structuralism
Rivkin. Culler, “Introduction: ‘The Linguistic Foundation’”
Rivkin. Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics”

7/23 DUE: Analysis #2 (Formalism or Structuralism)
DUE: Group Presentation #2 (Formalism or Structuralism)
Psychoanalysis
  
7/28  Psychoanalysis (cont’d)
Rivkin.  Rivkin, “Introduction: ‘Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis’”
Rivkin. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
Rivkin Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”

7/29  Psychoanalysis (cont’d)
DUE: Group Presentation #3 (Psychoanalysis)
Rivkin. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I”
Rivkin. Lacan, “The Symbolic Order”
Rivkin.  Deleuze and Guattari, “The Anti-Oedipus”
     
7/30  Marxism
Rivkin. Rivkin, “Introduction: ‘Starting with Zero: Basic Marxism’”
Rivkin. Marx, “Grundrisse”
Rivkin. Marx, “The German Ideology”
Rivkin. Marx, “Manifesto”

8/4    Marxism (cont’d)
Rivkin. Gramsci, “Hegemony”
Rivkin. Volosinov, “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”
Rivkin. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

8/5    DUE: Analysis #3 (Psychoanalysis or Marxism)
DUE: Group Presentation #4 (Marxism)
Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
Rivkin. Rivkin, “Introduction: ‘The Class of 1968’”
Rivkin. Derrida, “Différance
     
8/6   Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (cont’d)
Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”
Rivkin.  Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition”
Rivkin.  Deleuze and Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus”

8/11 Gender Studies
DUE: Group Presentation #5 (Postmodernism)
Rivkin. Foucault, “The History of Sexuality”
Rivkin. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

8/12  Gender Studies (cont’d)
DUE: Analysis #4 (Gender Studies or Postmodernism)
DUE: Group Presentation #6 (Gender Studies)
Rivkin. “Introduction: ‘Feminist Paradigms’”
Rivkin.  Fetterley, “On the Politics of Literature”
Rivkin. Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse”
Rivkin.  Gilbert and Gubar, “The Madwoman in the Attic”

8/13   Ethnic Studies and Post-Coloniality
Rivkin. Said, “Orientalism    
Rivkin. Anzaldua, “Borderlands/La Frontera”
DUE: Analysis #5 (Ethnic Studies and Post-Coloniality)
DUE: Group Presentation #7 (Ethnic Studies and Post-Coloniality)

8/18   Conclusion: Cyborgs and Posthumans
DUE: Final Paper


 



Much of the following list comes from Kristi Siegel's excellent theory site at http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm.

Suggested Readings:

Formalism

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: U Texas P, 1990.
  • ---. The Dialogic Imagination: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
  • ---. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1984.
  • ---. Speech Genres and Other Essays.  Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
    Holquist.  Trans. Vern W. McGee.  Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
  • Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London, 1979.
  • Ehrlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine.
  • Garvin, Paul L. (trans.) A Prague School Reader. Washington DC: Georgetown Academic P, 1973.
  • Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990.
  • Jakobson, Roman. "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics." Ed. Sebeok, Thomas. Style in Language, pp. 350-377.
  • Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction.
  • Lemon, Lee T. and Marion J. Reese. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays.
  • Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.
  • Medvedev, P.N. and Mikhail Bakhtin. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics.
  • Mukarovsky, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Trans. M. E. Suino. Ann Arbor: Michigan State UP, 1979.
  • Thompson, E.M. Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism.
  • Wellek, René. The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School.


New Criticism

  • Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Poetry. New York: Holt, 1938.
  • Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York, 1955.
  • Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism.
  • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
  • Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A
    Comparative Introduction.
  • Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941.
  • Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. London: Routledge & Paul, 1964.

Archetypal Criticism

  • Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.
  • Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: OUP, 1934.
  • Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949.
  • Frazer, J. G.The Golden Bough.
  • Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism and Fables of Identity: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
  • Graves, Robert. Greek Myths and The White Goddess.
  • Jung, Carl Gustav. Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature and various other works
  • Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy.
  • Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism.
  • Pratt, Anais. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
  • Seboek, Thomas A., ed. Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

  • Bloom, Harold. Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
  • Elliott, Anthony. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
  • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
  • Ellmann, Maud, ed. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1994.
  • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams.
  • Gay, Peter, ed.The Freud Reader. London: Vintage, 1995.
  • Jefferson, Anne and David Robey. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction.
  • Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection.
  • Sarup, Madan. Jacques Lacan. London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1992.
  • Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud.

Postcolonialism, Globalism, and Globalization

  • Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . London: Verso, 1983.
  • Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1996.
  • Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
  • Ashcroft, Bill. Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
  • Bauman, Zygmunt.  Globalization: The Human Consequences.  New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
  • Berger, Peter L., and Samuel P. Huntington, eds.  Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
  • Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.  London: Routledge, 1994.    
  • ---. Bhabha, Homi, ed.  Nation and Narration.  London: Routledge, 1990.
  • Guneratne, Anthony R. The Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others.
  • Harding, Sandra and Uma Narayan, ed. Border Crossings: Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminist Challenges to Philosophy 2. Indiana University Press, 1998.
  • Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin. White Masks. Trans. by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986.
  • Said, Edward. Orientalism.
  • ---. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
  • Smith, Paul. Millennial Dreams.  London: Verso, 1997.
  • Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World.
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge, 1988.
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1990.
  • Trinh, T. Minh-Ha, Woman. Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
  • Zheng, Yongnian. Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
    ---.  Globalization and State Transformation in China.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Marxism

  • Adorno, Theodore W.  The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.  Ed. J.M. Bernstein.  London: New York, 1991.
  • Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. London: Verso,1979.
  • Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Verso, 1996.
  • Aronowitz, Stanley. How Class Works. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
  • Bernstein, Eduard. The Precondtions of Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
  • Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review, 1974.
  • Cary, Nelson, and Lawrence Gross berg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, 1988.
  • Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. New York: Schocken, 1978.
  • Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
  • Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998.
  • Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. London: Verson, 1999.
  • Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: U of California P, 1935.
  • Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: PUP, 1971.
  • Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin, 1971.
  • Lenin, V.I. The Essential Works of Lenin. New York: Dover, 1966.
  • Therborn, Goran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital I. London: Penguin, 1976.
  • ---. Communist Manifesto. New York: Norton, 1988.
  • ---. Economic and Philosphic Manuscripts of 1844. Amherst: Prometheus, 1988.
  • ---. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1973.
  • ---. The Poverty of Philosophy. Amherst: Prometheus, 1995.
  • Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1966.
  • Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Penguin, 1979.
  • Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1996.
  • ---. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press, 1964.
  • Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1977.

Feminism

  • Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms, 1997.
  • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." 1993 .
  • Crow, Barbara A., ed. Radical Feminism: An Historical Reader, 1999.
  • Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, 1990.
  • Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 1982.
  • Grosz, E. A. (Elizabeth A.) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1989.
  • Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, N.Y : Cornell University Press, 1985. HQ1154 .I7413 1985
  • Kristeva (kris-TAYV-veh), Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi, 1986.
  • Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminism. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
  • Moi, Toril. Sexual/textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London ; New York : Methuen, 1985.PN98.W64 M65 1985
  • Oliver, Kelly, ed. French Feminism Reader. Rowman & Littlefield. 2000.
  • Showalter, Elaine, ed. Speaking of Gender, 1989.

 

Reader Response Theory

  • Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 1962
  • Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. 1978
  • Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. 1975.
  • Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
  • Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. 1979.
  • Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
  • Holland, Norman. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
  • Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974.
  • ---. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
  • Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
  • ---. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. U of Minneapolis P, 1982.
  • Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. 1982
  • Holland, Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response. 1968, 5 Readers Reading. 1975
  • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen, 1982.
  • Richards, I.A. How to Read a Page. 1942.
  • ---. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935.
  • Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. 1978.
  • Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.
  • Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton UP, 1980.
  • Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

 

New Historicism

  • Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
  • Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's 1998.
  • Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge, 1990.
  • Cox, Jeffrey N. and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
  • Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1984.
  • Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
  • ---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
  • ---. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
  • Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
  • Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
  • Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: PUP, 2001.
  • ---. Introduction. "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance." Genre 15 (Summer 1982): 3-6.
  • ---. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1991.
  • ---. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
  • Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989.
  • Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988.
  • McCann, Jerome. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. OUP, 1985.
  • Montrose, Louis. "New Historicisms." Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992.
  • Morris, Wesley. Toward a New Historicism. Princeton: PUP, 1972.
  • Vesser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

  • Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.
  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1982.
  • Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon, 1968.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
  • Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation.
  • Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.
  • Magliola, Robert R. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
  • Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schliermacher.
  • Ricouer, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics.

Postmodernism and Post/structuralism

  • Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. R. Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972
  • ---. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
  • Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London:Verso, 1988.
  • ---. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. St. Lois: Telos P, 1973.
  • ---. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
  • Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation and Cool Memories.
  • Bloom, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979.
  • Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. New York: Cornell UP, 1973.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
  • Doherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader.
  • Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on LanguageNew York: Pantheon, 1972.
  • ---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.
  • ---. Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1965.
  • ---. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.
  • Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
  • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.
  • Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism.
  • Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
  • Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
  • Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art.
  • Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked.1964. Trans. John and Doreen Weighman. New York: Harper, 1975.
  • ---. Structural Anthropology. Trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoeph. London: Allen Lane, 1968.
  • Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
  • McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction.
  • Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. W. Baskin. London: Fontana/Collins, 1974.