Ancients, Moderns, and Postmoderns

Many literary critics and art historians depend on stylized accounts of modernity, post-modernity, and antiquity. We will ask what purpose such accounts serve, what historical conditions have given rise to them, and what dangers they may pose to critics today. The primary purpose of this course is to equip graduate students to read critical arguments that turn on historical claims with greater sophistication and, just as important, to reflect on their own historical assumptions and methods. A secondary purpose is to prepare students to write arguments that will speak not just to colleagues in their narrow historical period but to colleagues who work on periods remote from theirs. One of the keys to succeeding as a critic is learning how to talk across period divisions. In their final essays, students should feel free to write about any work of literature, art object, or historical event, provided they in some way employ or resist a historicist interpretation. Essays on any of the theorists on the syllabus are also welcome.