E33D / E60C TOPICS COVERED: MODULE II: LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS / DECONSTRUCTION

CULTURAL THEORY / PHILOSOPHY

Lacanian Psychoanalysis:

1. The 'return to Freud'
2. Lacan on:
   1. the 'Mirror Stage' (the process of 'imaginary identification')
   2. the 'Symbolic Order' of human culture
   3. the role played by the 'signifier' in the formation of the unconscious
   4. how to interpret dreams (metaphor, metonymy)

Deconstruction:

1. Derrida's model of signification: his concept of 'différance'

CRITICAL THEORY

1. Barthes on: 
   1. the 'death of the author'
   2. intertextuality: 
      1. the rejection of realism
      2. reading via the 'codes' 
2. De Man on the way in which the meaning delivered by 'grammar' (the syntagmatic axis) is undermined (deconstructed) by 'rhetoric' (the paradigmatic axis)
3. Fish on:
   1. the productive role of the reader in interpretation
   2. using 'différance' to rethink the history of criticism
4. Bloom on literary history