024913 Literary Theory

This subject considers theory in relation to literature and its emerging applications in the fields of education and educational research. It outlines the major historical movements, from Plato to postmodernism, and introduces such topics as 'the idea of the characteristic', subjectivity, focalisation, metaphor, the influence of nineteenth-century social theory, feminism and gender studies, historicism and new historicism, postcolonialism, and ideology. It will refer, as appropriate, to the work of Marx, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Habermas, Kristeva, Derrida, Butler, Chodorow, Said, Spivak, Eagleton and others.