This course provides a grounding in key historical and contemporary debates about the nature, purpose, methods and goals of literary study. Topics to be addressed may include: the challenges involved in situating texts in their historical contexts; the question of how texts generate a plurality of meanings beyond the limits of ‘authorial intention’; critical methods for analysing how texts encode or subvert ideas about class, race, gender and sexuality; the nature of textual representation and the relation between language and reality; the nature of literary genre and the role of reader expectation; the insights of book history into changing understandings of authorship, publication, reading and criticism; the impact of digital technologies on modes of literary circulation; and the use of new digital methods to examine literary production in ways that reshape traditional categories of text and author, and raise fundamental questions about originality and the archive. 

In 2025 this course will be run with two halves. The first half delves deep into the innermost mind and feelings of the literary critic. It explores the idea that critics and literary theorists must divine texts, and ultimately, reveal something to us about them. The second half goes outward into the world, outside the bounds of Western universalism and Western hegemony, to look at theory and criticism on a global scale; postcolonial, Soviet and Chinese literary criticism and theory. By focussing on two extremities, the innermost and outermost worlds, this course aims to change the way we think about theory, and move our methods forwards into a new era.