For Friday, May 13 (10:20-12:10)

Nicole is baking a cake. I'm bringing a presspot of coffee. Y'all are bringing your Foe papers. And it would be nice if we could center our little kaffeeklatsch on Thomas DeZengotita's "Common Ground: Finding Our Way Back to the Enlightenment," just for kicks. (I'll also have some last words and course evaluations for you to fill out.)

I will hold office hours during finals week on Monday & Tuesday from 10:00 to 1:50 and Thursday from 10:20 to 12:10, and other times by appointment.

As you build your terraces--er, write your papers--here's something else for you to ponder: a personal essay from a recent issue of the New Yorker, "Farther Away," by novelist Jonathan Franzen, meditating on solitude, selfhood, his late friend David Foster Wallace, and the early English novel. All linked together somehow by his visit to a remote island in the South Pacific with a roundabout connection to Robinson Crusoe. There are three pages or so on Crusoe beginning at the bottom of p. 84, but perhaps the most evocative section of the essay is a three-paragraph stretch on p. 87 that begins this way:

The most interesting aspect of the novel's origin may be the evolution of English culture's answers to the question of verisimilitude: should a strange story be accepted as true because it is strange, or should its strangeness be taken as proof that it is false? The anxieties of this question are still with us (witness the scandal of James Frey's "memoir"), and they were certainly in play in 1719, when DeFoe published the first and best-known volume of "Robinson Crusoe." The author's real name appeared nowhere in it. The book was identified, instead, as "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe...Written by Himself," and many of its first readers took the story as nonfiction. Enough other readers doubted its authenticity, however, that Defoe felt obliged to defend its truthfulness when he published the third and last of the volumes, the following year. Contrasting his story with romances, in which "the story is feign'd," he insisted that his story, "though allegorical, is also historical," and he affirmed that "there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes."

For Wednesday, May 4 (Day 29)

At last we'll hear what Jonathan and Keegan have to say about the writing lessons and about Friday's capacity for speech. And then we can tie up--or at least take up--other loose Foe ends. Then the plan is to do a little collective detective work, searching for passages, themes, and recurring topics & motifs that seem to bear on or resonate with various theoretical issues. Which issues? You decide: start narrowing your focus to one or two aspects of this book that have piqued your curiosity or grabbed your attention most strongly...and put a name to them. Start with the list of concepts (authorship, authenticity, etc.) that I threw together on the Final Paper assignment sheet, but don't stop there. You might also go back through the other primary and secondary materials we ’ve read over the past few weeks, looking for things that take on a new salience in light of Foe.

Finally: I should claim a little time for last words and course evaluations, I guess--unless you're willing to come back with your fedoras and razor-fingered gloves on and do all that on, um, Friday the 13th. If you are, here's an article we could also take up. If you aren't, read it on your time soon, all the same.

In either case: see you Wednesday.

For Wednesday, April 27 (Day 27)

I'll have an in-class Foe project (a faux in-class project?) for you to work on, as well as a spec sheet for the final paper. Thanks to Salina for taking notes today.

For Monday, April 25 (Day 26)

Friend or Foe? I'll be updating the supplemental reading/resources links soon, as well as opening a discussion forum with some reading questions.

Meantime, a very small link-dump:

• The website (at PBS.org) for Skip Gates's Black in Latin America (where, among other things, you can watch the first episode)
• Michel Foucault debates Noam Chomksy on the nature of power (YouTube)

And some last words on our recent discussions, from an essay by the "The Chicago Cultural Studies Group" (what a great band they were!) called "Critical Multiculturalism" that appeared in Critical Inquiry 18:3 way back in 1992:

Intellectuals can never make themselves adequate to the standard of representing the subaltern point of view, of simply giving it speech.  Nor can they entirely do without that standard.  The anthropologist or subaltern analyst…finds him or herself in a necessarily tragic position…of inescapably bad faith—yet one that is nevertheless indispensable. (541)

The ‘authentic native voice’ can only be a highly problematic category in any case, insofar as any instance of the subaltern voice speaking to or in the West would entail some kind of intermediary role such as that played by intellectuals or the news media.…the project of ‘recovering’ a subaltern consciousness is impossible as a project of authenticity; it necessarily enters that consciousness as a reified object, thus effacing its dynamism and political agency. (543)

Ponder that as you dive into the wreck...

For Wednesday, April 20 (Day 25)

Can Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speak?

For Monday, April 18 (Day 24)

The moment of truth: what do we do with the last week (and a day?--final exam day, that is) of class?

Plus: Cult Studs, Imperial Branch. Reading and other links have been updated. Discussion forum is now online.

It's not too early to get a jump on Foe.

From the web, fun with race, gender, and/or sexuality:

• a New Yorker review of the first major retrospective of works by Glenn Ligon (sample his work here) at the Whitney Museum in New York
• a documentary on Judith Butler from French TV (split into six parts on YouTube)

For Wednesday, April 13 (Day 23)

So the "Empire" part, we get to next week. As for Wednesday: Abel and Christian, mostly.

Coincidentally, there's a timely piece on Henry Louis Gates's latest undertaking in this week's Newsweek, and it has to do with a topic that got raised briefly in class today--the fact that race and racism play out much differently in other parts of the world (like Latin America) than they do in the United States. The project

was inspired by one mind-boggling fact. Of the 11 million Africans who survived the middle passage between 1502 and 1866, only 450,000 arrived in North America. The rest landed south of the border in places like Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and Brazil, which have their own, largely unexplored histories and legacies of race and racism....

Racism—which in America is a good-guys, bad-guys story (white masters, black slaves; white oppressors, black victims)—expresses itself differently in countries where the majority of people are shades of brown. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Gates, as you may know, has become something of a celebrity in recent years, and that means he has his detractors. (I'll confess that I myself have long thought his best work is behind him.) But though many have tried, there are few other academics I can name who have succeeded so handsomely at becoming "public intellectuals" and bringing sophisticated thinking about race, politics, and culture to such a wide audience. So who am I to criticize?

A couple more interesting links, all of them from the New York Times and two of them courtesy of Jae:

• The occasionally thoughtful neocon David Brooks channels the always fascinating liberal sociolinguist George Lakoff (author of Metaphors We Live By) in a column extolling James Geary's I Is An Other.
• A piece on linguistic gender bias in/and religion quotes Terrence Tilley, chair of the religious studies department at Fordham University in the Bronx: "All revelation is received through language, and all language is culturally conditioned." Certain Catholic Bishops would find that statement heretical, it seems.
• And finally, in the WWJBS (What Would Judith Butler Say) Department: "In New Jersey, a Job Discrimination Lawsuit's Unusual Question: Who Is a Man?"

For Monday, April 11 (Day 22)

Race and Empire ("The Horror! The Horror!"). Links for next week's required reading (but not the week after) are updated. I'll open a discussion forum, with reading questions, by Saturday midday.

Net miscellany: two obituaries of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Chronicle of Higher Ed | The London Guardian)

For Wednesday, April 6 (Day 21)

Things turn queer. Get used to it.

For Monday, April 4 (Day 20)

So...I've replaced Elaine Showalter's survey of feminist criticism with Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker's. I know: it may seem odd to offer up three people with apparently masculine names as experts in feminist theory. But I think they actually do a very good job of "historicizing" the field and mapping its most prominent features. The older essay by Showalter, a major figure in modern feminist theory, is very good, but it's also now a bit of a museum piece.

I'm also asking you to read both a short piece by bell hooks and another survey--also by Raman & the two Peters--of "queer" theory. And I highly recommend that you choose to read some of either Foucault, Sedgwick, and/or Butler. (In the righthand column, meanwhile, I highly recommend the two lectures by Mary Klages.)

The selections by RW&B, by the way, come from the latest (5th) edition of A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005).

For Wednesday, March 30 (Day 19)

Well, as I sit down to write this update (at 3:50), Founders Hall has reopened at last--so I guess I can finally go retrieve my lunch and my now-lukewarm thermos of coffee.

Wednesday, we'll hear the Impossible Mission Task Force reports, and we'll talk a bit about Naomi Klein and Thomas Frank (and anything else that strikes your fancy).

A forewarning: there's potentially a ton of reading on next week's calendar. I may replace Showalter with a different piece, and I may also change the status of one or two of the pieces by Foucault, Sedgwick, and/or Butler to "recommended." In the meantime, the links are live, and you can start reading, regardless.

Midterm papers: Since class was cut short by the terrorists, here are the general comments that I didn't get to make (which you may think is just as well!). I really enjoyed reading your papers—and that’s why I returned them with so much blue ink and word-processed text, which I hope doesn’t overwhelm you.  My aim is to take you seriously as thinkers and to respond to you seriously as thinkers, to engage you in a dialogue and (I hope) help you refine the quality of your thinking.  Sometimes that means my comments wind up being half as long as your paper.  (Not that I’m naturally long-winded or anything.)  If you need me to boil down what I’ve said or clarify it--or if, god forbid, I’ve inadvertently said something hurtful, to mollify it--then come see me. 

I mentioned last week that I was impressed by the seriousness and ambition and good faith with which you approached this task, and I really was intrigued to see the problems you were attempting to define and solve.   Of course, mere effort is generally not enough to get you a high grade, though if you falter in pursuit of a serious ambition, then I count that as a noble failing.  Just the same, most people were quite successful—and imaginative—in focusing on a well-defined, manageable question or problem.  A few of you either got a little self-conscious about the fact that you were theorizing or else just had a hard time wrangling with a new critical vocabulary and making the words say what you wanted them to say, which means that some folks who are ordinarily quite clear and fluent in their memos would up sounding slightly convoluted or tongue-tied in their papers.

But that’s okay.  I realize most of you were facing not just a new vocabulary here but also a new genre of writing—and I tried to take that into account and cut you some slack.  At the same time I wanted to hold you to fairly high standards, so I was looking for a reasonable amount of intellectual rigor and precision as you defined an area of inquiry, articulated a thesis, and explored that thesis in a more-or-less orderly fashion.  (And, it should go without saying, I was looking for you to demonstrate at least a moderately firm grasp of the material you were working with.)  If I thought you did something fairly average, compared to what I know advanced undergrads are capable of doing, then I gave you a C; above average, a B; superior, an A.  If you need more details about those standards or if you’re for any reason unhappy with my assessment,  then again, let’s sit down together and talk about it.  And if you’re content but want to continue the conversation anyway, then we can do that, too.

For Monday, March 28 (Day 18)

On my agenda for the next few days: 1) Finish your midterm papers. 2) Catch up on the discussion forums. 3) Get next week's reading on Class & Capitalism ready. I know you'd probably prefer that I tackle the last item first, and I'll try to oblige. (And I'll let you know when I've done so.) In the meantime, you could do worse than check out the website of David Harvey, one of today's foremost Marx scholars. You can watch the 13-part lecture version of his A Companion to Marx's Capital for free.

Jae, who as a retired person has entirely too much time on his hands for leisure reading, sends the following links:

• Neuroscience proves it! We have free will
• Post-structuralism, historicized

Speaking of reading: there's a fair amount of it for next week. Pay attention to what's required and what's recommended and make your own choices.  (Links have been updated.) As usual, you can expect me to post some reading questions to the discussion forum, which should be open by the time you read this.

Finally, courtesy of HSU Information Officer Paul Mann, is a lovely adage from Voltaire: "Doubt is an unpleasant state, but certainty is absurd." Who knew that Voltaire was a post-structuralist?

For Wednesday, March 23 (Day 17)

Gayatri Spivak engages in deconstructive derring-do with the two-headed AronDunn.

For Monday, March 21 (Day 16)

Take a breather on your break--but keep up with the required reading, too. (Heck: read ahead!) The links on the "Week 8" Course Reader page have been updated and I'll open a forum by midweek. Looking forward to reading your papers.

And if you're looking for some guilt-free leisure reading (with respect to Engl 420, anyway): in the February 7 issue of The Nation there's a great review essay by Thomas Meaney of a new biography of structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Even if you're not moved to go plunk down $29.95 for the book, it's worth reading the essay, which marks Levi-Strauss as a central figure in 20th-century thought, a kind of pivot point between Saussure and Jakobson (and the Surrealists!) and Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, and Barthes, whose "careers...are impossible to imagine without him." (Never mind that he had little time for any of the latter; Lacan, in particular, he found "incomprehensible," says Meaney.)

What makes Levi-Strauss of particular interest to us is the fact that he "rails against the Western myth of the self-authorizing individual" ("the underlying structures of society left little room for the whimsy of subjectivity"). But what really distinguishes Levi-Strauss among anthropologists--and what links him with Freud, in this respect--is a characteristic of his thinking that Meaney calls his "sharp eye for cultural patterns, [his] novelistic feel for the shape of a story, [his] patience for synthesizing masses of abstruse data into meaningful wholes." (Hence the title of the biography under review, The Poet in the Laboratory.)

Also: Jae sends this article from the Times about gender symbolism and public sculpture. (Personally, I find that the modest size of certain, uh, obscured "bits" of the statue gives the gender question a no-doubt unintended twist...)

For Wednesday, March 9 (Day 15)

Midterm hiatus. On Wednesday, your papers are due. I'll be, um, "holding class" in my office, where I'll cheerfully receive those papers. And if you need to have an eleventh-hour conversation about them or about any other subject: I have office hours on Tuesday from 12:30 to 1:50. If we miss each other on Wednesday, then...have a rejuvenating Spring Break. (But be careful: in Spring, as my eighth-grade English teacher used to say, the juices and saps are flowing. And we all know what can happen if we give the Pleasure Principle free rein!)

For Monday, March 7 (Day 14)

A playday with Rosario Ferre. (And perhaps a post-mortem of Cherríe Moraga. Those who want a chance to write a memo on Moraga: I've opened a discussion forum. Here's what you do: attend her Social Justice Summit keynote address on Thursday afternoon and take good notes, with the aim of exploring how her talk--and perhaps her essay "La Güera" [from the Moodle site dedicated to her visit]--speaks to the theories of subjectivity that we've been studying.)

Fun from the internets, courtesy of Salina:

And as for me: I've been catching up on my periodical reading again. Jae's been incubating an idea for a final project on hermeneutics and constitutional "originalism," and while he's prepared to go it alone, he may welcome some collaborators. Perhaps this article from the February 7 issue of The Nation (Garrett Epps, "Stealing the Constitution") will drum up some interest. Some choice excerpts: " At its most basic level, reading the Constitution requires the tools that Vladimir Nabokov urged readers to bring to any text: imagination, memory, a dictionary and a willingness to use all three when the going gets tough." "This notion—that there is somehow a fixed, binding, single intent hidden in a each phrase of the Constitution—confuses the Constitution with the Bible." "Why has the right done such a good job of putting out its invented "Constitution"? Some of the responsibility lies with progressive legal scholars, who are well situated to explain the Constitution to the public. It isn't that they have failed; it's that they seldom try. Scholars from top schools hold forth with polysyllabic theories of hermeneutics that ordinary citizens can't fathom."

For Wednesday, March 2 (Day 13)

We hear from the Lacanians. And then from the Martiniquan. And who knows? Perhaps even from the Puerto Rican.

Lacanian LOLcat (the latest from Marianne Ahokas, who ceaselessly trolls the Internet so you don't have to):

For Monday, February 28 (Day 12)

You've probably already figured this out, but just in case: the fact that we're now a week behind the original calendar means that the due date for the midterm paper is moved back, too--to Wednesday, March 9. (I realized today that there's some other hinkiness with the calendar that I need to clear up, too. Stay tuned.)

The links for next week's reading ("Week 6") should all be good; let me know if you run into any problems.

I look forward to talking with you about midterm papers over the next few days.

Here's some interesting stuff related to Salina's comments at the start of today's class. First, poet, feminist, and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, from "A Weapon of Mass Destruction" (her column of January 31):

Might an unbalanced young man be influenced by the world around him? The very idea is "political opportunism," harrumphs [conservative New York Times columnist] David Brooks: Loughner was simply deranged, possibly schizophrenic and "locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it."

In a way, sure. For example, there's no evidence that Loughner knew about Sarah Palin's notorious electoral map on which Giffords's district was one of twenty marked with cross hairs. This was a man who disrupted his community college math class by shouting out questions about the end of the world, posted gibberish on YouTube and was fired as an animal-shelter volunteer because he deliberately walked puppies in an area quarantined for parvovirus. But you don't have to be Michel Foucault to understand that mentally ill people express their demons in ways that are culturally—and politically—inflected, and in Arizona that inflection is right-wing antigovernment hysteria. He may never have mentioned Palin (and really, must she always be the center of attention?), but his obsessions—the gold standard, government tyranny through mind control, the "second Constitution"—are familiar themes of far-right patriot movements. Mark Potok, who monitors wing-nut extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center, sees in the jumble of novels on Loughner's MySpace page a theme of the individual against the totalitarian state, with Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto thrown in "as variants of a kind of generalized 'smash the state' attitude." And David Brooks, let's get real: Loughner opened fire on a government event—a Democratic government event—not a shopping mall, a swimming pool or a classroom at Pima County Community College, from which he'd been suspended.

This is squarely in line with The Nation's lead editorial in that same issue, which argues:

Republicans, gun activists and Tea Party adherents are trying to put distance between themselves and the Tucson rampage by pointing to Loughner's evident mental illness. But Loughner's mental state does not absolve the lock-and-loaders of responsibility. To the contrary: it is well established in psychiatric literature that the delusions experienced by schizophrenics are shaped by the language, images, resentments and fears that permeate their wider culture in any particular country or time. Those politicians and pundits inviting or implying "Second Amendment remedies" for liberal "conspiracies" on immigration, healthcare, President Obama's citizenship, gun regulation and on and on are selling a daily dose of eliminationist fantasy to the angriest and most estranged minds—including those unable to draw a distinction between gunsight as metaphor and real-life target practice on politicians.

An important debate. (But also potential midterm paper fodder?)

For Wednesday, February 23 (Day 11)

We examine the function of the "Author-Function," in general and from at least one angle that Foucault didn't explicitly consider. I'll be seeing some of you during office hours on Tuesday (and Wednesday and Thursday) to talk about midterm paper plans.

Here's that link to Foucault on Twitter.

For Monday, February 21 (Day 10)

Thanks to the hydra-headed hermeneuticists for an enlightening debate. Next week, a bit more Barthes and Foucault, by way of an introduction to post-structuralism. (And I'm sure Professor Hirsch won't be comforted if I try to insist that those two come not to bury the Author, but to praise Him....) I have opened up a new discussion forum--with a few reading questions.

Speaking of Foucault, you may be interested in checking out this New York Times story about the new "Monopoly" (Panopticon Edition): "[I]n the center [of the board], instead of dice and Chance and Community Chest cards, an infrared tower with a speaker issues instructions, keeps track of money and makes sure players adhere to the rules. The all-knowing tower even watches over advancing the proper number of spaces."

And speaking of authorizations: you may feel that you're not ready to talk (i.e., write) about the ideas we've been exploring with any authority yet.  But I think you are, so I'm authorizing you to do so. In fact, I'm directing you to do so, since it's time to start thinking about your midterm papers.  As/after you've done this week's reading & writing, you should be glancing backwards and starting to think "syn-thetically." Review what you've read and written so far and try to integrate and synthesize what you've learned (or think you've learned). Everything we've examined over the first 5 weeks has had something to do with various fundamental aspects of literary study and interpretation: displinarity, (literary) language, the literary object (work or text), the aims and mechanics of interpretation, authorship & authority.  Put these topics together and make 'em talk to each other in the service of your own enquiries. More--but not much more--direction in class, perhaps.

For Wednesday, February 16 (Day 9):

The professorial debate continues. Professor Hirsch concedes that there is no inherent reason to prefer authorial meaning over readerly "significance"--especially considering that the closest we may come to the author's original intention is an educated approximation. And yet, he insists, we must have some absolute standard of measurement, some bulwark against the wanton, anarchic proliferation of meanings. Professors Iser and Fish: is that a legitimate concern? Is there anything that would constrain us against saying that a given work of literature means any old thing we might want it to mean? Stay tuned...

For Monday, February 14 (Day 8):

Did I say late morning? I clearly meant late afternoon.

So: we're now officially one week behind the calendar. As per the executive fiat that I announced in class yesterday, this means, first of all, that I'm extending the deadline to post a memo to the current (Hirsch, Iser, Fish) forum. If you haven't posted and would like to, you may have till Sunday evening. If you've already posted and would like to stand pat, fine--but if you'd like to revise/retract/repost, you have that option.

On Monday we'll finally chart some positions on the hermeneutical circle. Study the texts by and about Hirsch, Iser, and Fish again, imagining specifically how their ideas "speak" to each other.

If you'd like to read ahead (never a bad idea), the "Week 6" page in the Course Reader is now up to date.

Wednesday, February 9 (Day 7):

See Day 6, below.

Salina shares "the quote I read in class [last Wednesday] that helped me understand Barthes's ideas a little more.. in case [it] would help anyone else get through his work":

The correlation of the terms signifier, signified, and sign is where associative meaning is made.  What we see in an advertisement or product label, at first glance, are basic elements composed of linguistic signs (words) and iconic signs (visuals).  Barthes (1972) uses a rose, for example, as a symbol of passion.  Roses are not passion per se, but rather the roses (signifier) + concept of passion (signified) = roses (sign).  He states that 'the signifier is empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning' (Barthes, 1972).

--Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race and Ethnicity. 4th Edition, p. 323

Also, more fun with theory on teh interwebs: LOL theorists

For Monday, February 7 (Day 6):

So: with your kind acquiescence, I've cancelled Monday's class. (Please come to the free Vijay Iyer public workshop in TA 115, which is where I'll be. For that matter, come to the concert on Sunday night.)

This means we'll finally, anticlimactically, mosey "From Work to Text" on Wednesday, and we'll lag a bit behind the calendar for the foreseeable future. Just the same, you should prepare the "Week 4" reading for Wednesday, as well. If you're planning to post a reading memo, I'll extend that deadline till Tuesday evening.

In addition to Iser & Fish (whose essays are long! but entertaining), pay particular attention to Eagleton’s account of E.D. Hirsch, who doesn’t get to speak for himself.  Don’t get too wrapped up, though, in the details of the early part of Eagleton’s Chapter 2—the part about Husserl & Heidegger, phenomenology & hermeneutics.

For Wednesday, February 2 (Day 5):

Wednesday, having drifted into the materiality and sociality of language courtesy ofthe Russian Formalists, we put our shoulder to the wheel and fully commit fully to "the linguistic turn" (you could look it up).

Once again, I need to make time to review and update the online reading for next week. I'll let you know when I've done so. Thanks for your patience.

For Monday, January 31 (Day 4):

Reading for Week 3 is ready to go (Eagleton 1-14, along with various items in the Course Reader). Note that Schklovsky--on the syllabus--has been removed. And the piece by Ferdinand de Saussure (with an introduction by Peter Barry) has had its missing graphics restored.

I've opened a new discussion forum and primed it with some reading questions--and over the weekend I'm aiming to give at least brief acknowledgments to those who posted memos last week.

Finally, humor for theory-nerds, via the blogosphere: Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault? (Okay, so Michael Pollan--UC Berkeley journalism prof and best-selling food writer--isn't a "theorist," exactly. Still.)

For Wednesday, January 26 (Day 3):
Peter Barry...still coming, I guess.

Wednesday, we tie up a few loose Eagleton ends and turn our attention to Uncle Mike--er, Michel. The burning question: how can we understand English not just as a discipline of study (in the commonly accepted sense of the term), but as a "discipline" in the sense intended by Foucault--i.e., as a particular arrangement of knowledge that is simultaneously part of a subtle distribution of power?

For Monday, January 24 (Day 2): 
The Moodle page for our class is now "visible," which means that the first discussion forum is open for your memos. (I've already posted some writing prompts/discussion questions there.)

Of course, before you write a memo, you've got a whole lot of reading to do. Eagleton is at the bookstore, and I've reanimated the dead Foucault link on the "Week 2" page of the online Course Reader. The rest of the links for next week are in good health, and I'll be reviewing the reading for Week 3 soon.

I hope you'll also find time to explore some of the Week 2 Web Resources and/or the General Internet Resources page. (I clearly need to fix a few links on the latter page, including the Johns Hopkins Guide link.) And I hope that some of you will procure yourselves a copy of the David Macey's Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory and do a little browsing--though there is also a copy in the library's reference section (PN98.S6 M33 2000).

Finally: that Peter Barry handout I mentioned on the syllabus (for today's class)? I'll either turn it into a PDF and post it or distribute it to you in class on Monday.