Critical Poetics

After recent critiques of "close" methods of literary criticism and reading practices, what claims can we make today about the literary object? Can we ever return to broad and general categories of poetics that were formulated by the major syncretic works of twentieth-century literary criticism by figures such as Auerbach, Curtius, and Frye? This course will discuss recent debates around literariness and concepts of poetics that move past a hermeneutic of suspicion and embrace the productive energies of form and affect produced by literary texts, including new methods of data analysis and concepts of genres in historical time.