1993 HYPERTEXT DATABASE

These materials were created back in 1993. They were part of an early experiment with hypertext, and they were designed to serve as a kind of online reference tool, an electronic database, that would provide information about major schools of criticism (specifically, New Criticism, Marxist criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism) to students who weren't taking English 60A.

When, in the fall of 1996, I first thought of setting up a full-fledged website for this course, I assumed that students would expand on this database, but I soon discovered that they had other fish to fry.

Still, I have a lot of affection for these pages--and especially for the students who suffered through the first version of this course: Chris Abele, Liz Cronmiller, Allison DeZurik, Josh Hudson, Diana Marinos, Matt Ogborn, and Tamara Pellicier. If they ever visit this site, I hope they'll make a point of dropping me a line.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. New Criticism

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• New Critical Formalism
• The Heresy of Paraphrase
• Intentional and Affective Fallacies
• The New Critics' Preference for Poetry
• Possible Critiques and Responses

II. Marxist Criticism

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• A Materialist View of History
• The Base and Superstructure Model
• Ideology
• Georg Lukacs and the Social Realists
• Antonio Gramsci
• Louis Althusser
• Central Marxist Concepts
• Marxism and Literature
• Marxism and Other Theories
• Works Cited
• Further Reading

III. Psychoanalytic criticism

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Creativity and Neurosis
• Author Psychology
• Overdetermination
• Psychobiography
• Freud and Feminism
• Works Cited
• Further Reading

WHAT NEXT?

• Homepage for English 60A
  
• Overview of the entire ten-week syllabus
  
• Handouts for the course
  
• Students' responses to readings from the course
  
• Students' web projects from the most recent version of the course