Calvin Thomas offers two sample syllabi for incorporating Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology and Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing into your literary theory course.
I: Syllabus for a sixteen week course in Contemporary Critical Theory that would use Adventures in Theory as sole text.
Introductions
Editor’s Introduction: Gearing Up For Adventures
First Module: Foundations of Anti-foundational Theory
Marx, “Three Excerpts from Early Writings” (1844)
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Non-Moral Sense” (1873)
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (1967)
Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot” (1977)
Second Module: Semiotics, Aesthetics, Identity, Ideology
Saussure, “The Signifier Considered in its Totality” (1916)
Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)
Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (1952)
Barthes, “Myth Today” (1957)
Editor’s Interlude: Two Brief Pieces on Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory
Althusser, “On Ideology” (1971)
Zizek, “The Real of Sexual Difference” (2002)
Third Module: Poststructuralist, Postmodernist, and Postcolonial Theory
Johnson, “A Critique of Western Metaphysics” (1983)
Derrida, “Differance” (1967)
Said, “From the Introduction to Orientalism” (1978)
Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (1987)
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)
Fourth Module: Feminism, Gender Studies, and Queer Theory
Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975)
Butler, “From Interiority to Gender Performatives” (1990)
Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive” (1998)
Editor’s Afterword: (Still) No Kingdom (of the Queer)
II: Syllabus for a sixteen-week course in theory that would use Adventures in Theory(as intended) in conjunction with Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing
Introductions Matter
Ten Lessons: Preface: “Something worth reading”: Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence; Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives
Adventures: Editor’s Introduction: Gearing Up for Adventures
Part One: Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis
Antiphysis and/as Anthropogenesis
Ten Lessons: Lesson One: “The world must be made to mean”—or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality
Adventures: Marx, “Three Excerpts from Early Writings” (1: From “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”)
Antiphysis and/as Semiotics
Ten Lessons: Lesson Two: “Meaning is the polite word for pleasure”—or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read; Lesson Three: “Language is by Nature Fictional”—or, why the word for moonlight can’t be moonlight
Adventures: Nietzsche: “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Saussure: “The Sign Considered in its Totality,” Barthes: “Myth Today”
Antiphysis and/as Interpretation
Ten Lessons: Lesson Four: “Desire must be taken literally”—a few words on sex, death, and interpretation
Adventures: Editor’s Interlude: Two Brief Pieces on Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory (2: Symbolic Castration); Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”; Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot”
Antiphysis + Identity = Ideology?
Ten Lessons: Lesson Five: “You are not yourself”—or, I (think, therefore I) is an other
Adventures: Editor’s Interlude: Two Brief Pieces on Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory (1: The Mirror Stage); Althusser, “On Ideology”; Zizek, “The Real of Sexual Difference”
Part Two: Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity
Extimacy and/as Dialectic
Ten Lessons: Lesson Six: “This restlessness is us”—or, the least that can be said about Hegel
Adventures: Fanon: “The Fact of Blackness”
Extimacy and/as Defamiliarization
Ten Lessons: Lesson Seven: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—or, the fates of literary formalism
Adventures: Marx, “Three Excerpts from Early Writings” (2: Estranged Labor & 3: Money) Shklovsky: “Art as Technique”
Extimacy and/as the Unconscious
Ten Lessons: Lesson Eight: “The unconscious is structured like a language”—or, invasions of the signifier
Extimacy and/as Constitutive Otherness
Ten Lessons: Lesson Nine: “There is nothing outside the text”—or, fear of the proliferation of meaning
Adventures: Johnson, “A Critique of Western Metaphysics”; Derrida: “Differance”;
Said, “From the Introduction to Orientalism”: Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Extimacy and/as Global Queerness
Ten Lessons: Lesson Ten: “One is not born a woman”—on making the world queerer than ever
Adventures: Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”;
Butler, “From Interiority to Gender Performatives”; Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive”
The Ending Isn’t Over
Ten Lessons: In the End: Theory is (not—) Forever
Adventures: Editor’s Afterword: (Still) No Kingdom (of the Queer)
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Calvin Thomas is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing (Bloomsbury, 2013), Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (2008) and Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (1996). He is the editor of Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (2000), and Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, now available from Bloomsbury.