The purpose of this introductory course is to familiarize students with the central figures, major ideas and dominant intellectual movements that had shaped the study of literature. The history of the field will be presented as a series of intellectual conflicts in which competing sets of ideas about the nature of literature, language, meaning, selfhood and truth clash and inform one another. We shall read texts by Plato and Aristotle, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Foucault and other 20th-century theorists.

Requirements: reading, attendance, midterm exam, final exam.