English 299wc. Wild Criticism

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthrian
Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Beginning with Oscar Wilde, who suggested in 1891 that “the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not,” this course shows today’s debates over “creative criticism” and “postcriticism” to have a long history. We’ll consider, in particular, writers who quote other writers at length—close reading them—but in nonplussing, counterintuitive, even shocking ways. Monica Youn and William Empson, for instance, read John Milton against the grain; Pierre Bayard returns to Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and suggests another solution to its murder mystery; Adam Phillips reimagines Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener as a tale about an eating disorder. W.E.B. Du Bois, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Anne Carson all write major works that are also experiments with the rhetorics of literary criticism. Which all raises the question: how should we write about books now? Students taking this course will author “wild criticism” of their own, moving across and into and through and between texts in adventurous ways.

Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates. Undergraduates, please contact Prof. Ravinthiran before classes begin if you would like to take the course.