世界文学と東アジアI（９）

This course aims at introducing some crucial texts of what is called “literary theory.” Literary theory, or simply “theory,” here designates a particular form of writing and thinking that mainly covers a group of texts and authors around 1960s in Europe, particularly in France. One could even argue that these texts constitute a particular genre which is still influential in the present-day. All the technical terms that since then have been circulating in humanities and, to some extent, mass media, such as structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and, of course, postmodernism, are derived more or less from “literary theory.” Through unpacking and reading closely several crucial texts in this labyrinthine field, this course takes it as its purpose that students will leave with a feeling, no matter how ambiguous it might be, about theory and its impacts on the way in which we read literature, and the way in which we understand our life.