This document outlines the topics that will be covered in an English literature course over the next few weeks. It includes discussions of works by Graff and Birkenstein on their approach to academic writing, Culler's book on literary theory, definitions of literature, Foucault's concept of discourse, and hierarchies of literary genres. The document poses questions for students to consider related to these topics and concepts. It also lists additional works and topics that will be covered in future class sessions, including Derrida, fairytales as discourse, signs and supplements, mastery in writing, and returning a week 0 assessment.

1. Entering Academic
Conversations:
What are they talking about?
En120, Spring 2013
Week 1: Monday, 11 February
Prof. E. Kugler

2. Graff and Birkenstein's
They Say/I Say
Describe their approach?
What is their stated point?
What is implicit?
What is at stake for them?
What kind of writing styles and techniques
do they value?

3. Culler's Literary Theory:
A Very Short Introduction
Do you see the rhetorical moves advocated by
Graff and Birkenstein in use here?
Where does Culler express his own views or those
of others?
Or, at least, when does he represent his own views
or represent his take on the views of others?

4. What is Culler's point?
Why does he see the need for this book?
Into what sorts of conversations is he intervening?

5. What is Literature?
• Pause and consider what types of texts you consider
literary.
List them.
• In groups of 3, organize them in relation to each other.
• Put this chart on the board.

6. The Paradox of Literature
Literature is a paradoxical institution because to create
literature is to write according to existing formulas - to
producing something that looks like a sonnet or that
follows the conventions of the novel - but it is also to
flout those conventions, to go beyond them.
Literature is an institution that that lives by exposing and
criticizing its own limits, by testing what will happen if one
writes differently.
(Culler 40)

7. The Paradox of Literature
So literature is at the same time the name for the utterly
conventional . . .
and for the utterly disruptive, where reader have to
struggle to create any meaning at all)
(Culler 40)

8. Attempts to Define
Literature
Contexts and Conventions: We name something as literature
because it is presented as such.
"To describe 'literature' would be to analyze a set of
assumptions and interpretive operations readers may
bring to bear on such texts" (Culler 25).

9. Attempts to Define
Literature
We assume there's a purpose beyond the surface
meaning, because it has been labeled as "literature"
'Literature is an institutional label that gives us reason
to expect that the results of our reading efforts will be
'worth it.' And many of the features of literature follow
from the willingness of readers to pay attention, to
explore uncertainties, and not immediately ask 'what
do you mean by that?'(Culler 27).

10. Most of the time what leads readers to treat something as
literature is that they find it in a context that identifies it as
literature: in a book of poems or a section of a magazine,
library, or bookstore. (Culler 27).
Would you have seen the Burney
mastectomy letter as literary if you
encountered it in a different context?

11. 5 Theories
on the
Nature of Literature
• Literature is the 'foregrounding' of language
• Literature as the integration of language
• Literature as fiction
• Literature as aesthetic object
• Literature as intertextual or self-reflexive construct

12. 5 Theories
on the
Nature of Literature
When you read these theories, which was the most
familiar to you?
Which made the most sense?
Why do you think this was the case?

14. What's the Question:
Theory as Methodology
Culler defines theory as
1) Interdisciplinary: as a "discourse with effects outside an
original discipline" (Culler 14).
2) Analytical and Speculative: it "attempt[s] to work out
what is involved in what we call sex or language or
writing or meaning or the subject" (14).
3) Critical of Assumptions, aka "common sense" or
"concepts taken as natural" (15).
4) Reflexive: questions "the categories we use in making
sense of things"; it is "thinking about thinking" (15).

15. What is "discourse"?
Culler characterizes the theories of Michel Foucault as
offering "a general framework for thinking about texts
and discourses in general" (13).
Foucault "proposes to show us not how insightful or
wise texts are but how far the discourses of doctors,
scientists, novelists, and others create the things they
claim only to analyze. . . . [He] shows how creatively
productive the discourses of knowledge are" (13).

16. What is "discourse"?
At a basic level, "discourse" is the conversation
surrounding an idea. Theorists, such as Foucault, are
interested in how that discourse/conversation defines
the idea itself.
What statements are made about X?
What are the rules for discussing X? What is included
or excluded from that discussion?
Who is the subject that personifies X?
What are the practices for dealing with those
subjects?
How does one discourse decline and another take its
place?

17. What is "discourse"?
For Foucault, as Culler points out, "power . . . is not
something someone wields but 'power/knowledge':
power in the form of knowledge or knowledge as
power. What we think we know about the world - the
conceptual framework in which we are brought to
think about the world - exercises great power" (8).

18. What is "discourse"?
Literature is not, then, the primary concern of
Foucault's analysis, but it is part of a discourse.
The study of literature through a foucauldian
lens allows scholars to talk about ideas of
madness, sex, sexuality, gender, punishment,
etc. as historical constructions. They "look at
how the discursive practices of a period,
including literature, may have shaped the things
we take for granted" (9).

19. What is Literature?
• Return to your list of literary types.
• Which do you think are granted more cultural value than
others?
• Why? How are these hierarchies created?
• What is the discourse surrounding those categories?

20. Next time
Derrida's life suffused with signs (Culler 9-14)
Fairytale as Discourse
Signs and Supplements in "Sure Thing"
Lun
Lunsford's EasyWriter
Questions of Mastery: what is "enough"
knowledge for you?
Eight Journals Collected
Week 0 Assessment Returned