This seminar explores theory in  three areas representative of the three departments in the graduate group: texts, material things in context, and images.  Each will be studied in four week units.

Participants will each lead two discussions on assigned readings, with no more than one in the student's field of study.  Three papers exploring ideas or readings will be required, two of which must be outside the student's discipline.  These should be short, between 5 and 7 pages normal typescript.

The readings are available at Carpenter Reserve and on E-reserve.

The schedule is as follows:

TEXTS -
Week 1: Introductory
 

Week 2: Interpretation, Intention, Meaning

Knapp and Michaels. "Against Theory", Critical Inquiry 8.4 (summer 1982.

Hirsch,E.D.  Validity in Interpretation  Ch 4.
Wimsatt and Beardsley.  "The Intentional Fallacy" -  (in The Verbal Icon 1954/ The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts andContemporary Trends.  Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 748-56.

Iser,W.  "The Reading Process" in Reader Response Theory, Ed. L. Rosenblatt.

Also Perhaps:

Sontag, S. "Against Interpretation" Ch.1 in Against Interpretation (NY 1966/1986).

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson  "Pragmatics" Cognition 10: 1980 281-286

Week 3: History and Historicism
 

White, Hayden           "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact " - Ch 3 in Tropics of Discourse.  Baltimore 1978.

Rosenmeyer, T.G.  "History or Poetry? The Example of Herodotus." Clio 11.3 (1982): 239-59.

Kurke, L.V. "Herodotus and the Language of Metals" Helios 22: 36-64. 1994 (cf. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. Princeton 2000).

Greenblatt, S. "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" - Ch.4 of Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Reneaissance England.
 

  Also, perhaps:

Momigliano, ASettimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, pp.50--. Rome 1984.

Mink, L.  "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument." Historical Understanding, ed. B. Fay, E. Golob, and R. Vann (Ithaca 1987) 199.

Week 4: Form and Structure

Aristotle.  Poetics.
(e.g. here) Genette, G. Narrative Discourse Ch.4, "Mood" (161-211).

Benardete, S.  "Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus" in Woodard, T., Sophocles (NJ 1966).

Derrida, J. "Plato's Pharmacy" parts i, ii, and iii; in Dissemination, tr. Johnson, (Chicago 1981) pp. 65-94.

    Also, perhaps:

Bakhtin, M. "Epic and Novel", Ch.1 in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. (Texas 1981)

Week 5: Information, Media and Material

McLuhan, M.  "Roles, Masks and Performances"  New Literary History 2 (1971) 517-31.

McLuhan, M.  "Alphabet, Mother of Invention" (with R.K. Logan) Et Cetera 34 (1977) 373-83.
Paulson, W. The Noise of Culture pp. --[tba] (Ithaca 1988).

Borgmann, A. "Realizing Information" in Holding on to Reality pp. 85-121 (Chicago 1999).

Hurwitt, J. The Art and Culture of Early Greece. pp. 71-125 (Ithaca 1985)

    Also Perhaps:

    Havelock, E. A Preface to Plato pp. -- [tba]

Useful Books:

Eagleton, T. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis 1996)

THINGS -
(» on e-reserve look up under 'Department': 'Graduate Seminar {Bryn Mawr}'.  password is gsemb679)

Background reading available at the Bookstore:

BruceTrigger, A History of Archaeological Thought.  New York: Cambridge University Press. 1989.  See especially Chapter 5. Culture-historical archaeology, Chapter 7. Functionalism in Western Archaeology.

Week 6: Processual archaeology and systems theory

General Reading:
Trigger, Chapter 8. Neo-evolutionism and the New Archaeology. pp. 289-328.

Specific readings:
»Lewis Binford, Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28 (1962) 217-25

»Lewis Binford, Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. AmericanAntiquity 31 (1965) 203-10.

»David Clarke, Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence.  Antiquity 67 (1973) 6-18.

»David Clarke. Analytical Archaeology. Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.  Chapter 2. Culture systems--the model, pp. 42-83.  See also succeeding chapters.

Patty Jo Watson, Steven LeBlanc and Charles Redman, Archaeology: an explicitly scientific approach. New York. 1971.

Method:
»Lewis Binford, A consideration of archaeological research design.  American Antiquity 29 (1964) 425-41.

Week 7: Evolution

Reading:
»Robert Dunnel. Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, 3 (1980) 35-99.

Week 8: Middle Range Theory

General Reading:
Trigger, Chapter 9, esp. pp. 357-69.

Specific readings:
»Lewis Binford , General Introduction. In Lewis Binford. Ed. For theory buildng in archaeology. 1977. Pp. 1-10.

»Michael B. Schiffer, Toward the Identification of Formation Processes. American Antiquity 48(1983), 675-706.

»Michael B. Schiffer, The Structure of Archaeological Theory", American Antiquity 53 (1988), 461-485.

Michael B. Schiffer,  Formation Processes in the Archaeological Record.1987.

and a critique:

»Mark L. Raab and Albert C. Goodyear. Middle Range Theory in Archaeology: A Critical Review of Origins and Applications. American Antiquity 49 (1984) 255-68.

Week 9: "Post-processual" and "Critical" archaeology

General Reading:
Trigger, Chapter 10. Archaeology and its social context.  370-411.

Specific readings:

»Mark Leone. Some Opinions about Recovering Mind. American Antiquity  47 (1982) 742-60.

or for a formulation with responses see

Mark Leone, Parker Potter, and Paul Shackel. Toward a Critical Archaeology. Current Anthropology 28 (1987) 283-302. available online

Ian Hodder.  Reading the Past (2nd ed.) 1991. chapters 7-8, pp. 121-193.  Multiple copies on Reserve Shelf.

Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley. Re-constructing archaeology : theory and practice.  New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987.

»Robert W. Preucel.The Philosophy of Archaeology.  In Robert W. Preucel.  Ed.  Processual and postprocessual archaeologies : multiple ways of knowing the past. Carbondale, Ill. : Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1991. Pp. 17-29.

»Alison Wylie.  A proliferation of new archaeologies: "Beyond objectivism and relativism".  In Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Archaeological theory : who sets the agenda?  New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 20-26.

IMAGES -
Week 10: See the distributed packet of readings on the Laocoon.

Week 11: Iconography and Iconology (Panofsky, Warburg, Clark, Pollock)

Week 12: Semiotics (Peirce, Saussure, Barthes, Damisch, Bryson and Bal)

Week 13: Psychoanalysis (Morelli, Freud, Stokes, Fuller, Lacan, Zizek)

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Schedule
TEXTS    THINGS   IMAGES