FF:AJ24251 Henry James and his Critics - Course Information

AJ24251 Henry James and his Critics

Extent and Intensity

0/2/0. 2 credit(s) (plus 3 credits for an exam). Recommended Type of Completion: zk (examination). Other types of completion: z (credit).

Teacher(s)

doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, PhD. (lecturer)

Guaranteed by

doc. PhDr. Jana Chamonikolasová, Ph.D.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Tomáš Hanzálek
Supplier department: Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts

Timetable

Tue 14:00–15:40 G25

Course Enrolment Limitations

The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 8 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/8, only registered: 0/8, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/8

fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with

there are 17 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display

Course objectives

Henry James is regularly identified as a transitional writer, making not only the spatial crossing from his American youth to his adult years in Europe but also the stylistic crossing from the realist idiom of nineteenth-century literature to the formal density and explorations of consciousness that have routinely aligned his late works with the rise of modernism. In the course of these transitions, James produced some of the masterpieces of Anglo-American fiction, including The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Ambassadors and The Turn of the Screw. This course examines James’s oeuvre in part through the love affair it has inspired in critics of every theoretical persuasion. Reading a series of notable interpretations of James’s fiction alongside the works analyzed will help us to pose the question: “Whose James?” For instance, James features as a key example in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a book that founded Queer Theory as an academic discipline. James’s writing plays an equally pivotal role in Bill Brown’s groundbreaking A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), a work which established Material Culture Studies as a new discourse in contemporary literature departments. Shosana Felman uses James’s great novella The Turn of the Screw to justify the controversial practice of Deconstruction in her canonical essay, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Likewise, James’s writing is a fixture in prominent Freudian, Foucauldian and Feminist readings. In light of his utility to contradictory doctrines, it isn’t surprising that James himself is a subject of intense controversy. Should we view James as the elite formalist, the artist in the ivory tower, presented by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Eric Savoy, or, as today’s scholars tend to argue (in keeping with the broader academic shift from new criticism and structuralism to post-structuralism and cultural studies), should we consider James an engaged social critic!? Perhaps no question has provoked more disagreement than James’s positions on sexuality and on women. Do we agree with John Carlos Rowe that James derided the “woman’s fiction” he grew up reading? Do we side with Victoria Coulson’s vehement objection to such claims as “tone-deaf” to James’s “anguish and solidarity . . . at . . . scenes of feminine struggle”, a view which, in turn, echoes Peggy McCormack’s argument that James possessed intense feminist sympathies aligned with the concerns of female authors? Or, finally, do we incline toward Donatello Izzo’s thesis that James was a Foucauldian avant la lettre whose characterizations exhibit a progressive awareness of gender’s discursive determinations? This course, taught jointly by Professor Rhoads and Professor Kaylor, gives you a chance to join the exceptionally rich critical debate on the work of a great author. And we ask you to take that challenge quite literally. Please enroll only if you intend to come to class prepared and to participate in the conversation. This seminar is reserved as a discussion forum for those who want the opportunity for more engagement than lecture-style courses allow.

Language of instruction

English

Further Comments

Study Materials
The course is taught once in two years.

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