Critical Theory Reading List

The following reading list for the English and Film Studies PhD program is provided by the department and is updated yearly to reflect changes in the discipline.

For more information about reading lists, see the Comprehensive Area Exam page.

*A number of titles listed below can be found in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. By the same token, any of the titles taken from the Norton can also be found in other collections or in the volume in which they originally appeared.

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972 (1941).

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation”. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984 (1976).

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991

Aristotle, Poetics.

Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 806-25

Auerbach, Erich. “Odysseus' Scar”. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974 (1953).

Bahktin, Mikhail. “Epic and Novel”; “Discourse in the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas, 1981.

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine Van Boheemen. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto, 1997

Barthes, Roland. From Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972

----. “The Death of the Author” (1968). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. *Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York and London: Norton, 2001. Pp. 1466-69

Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure”. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Selected Writings. Vol. 3: 1935- 1938. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 101-33.

----. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007. Pp. 253-264.

Bhabha, Homi. “The Commitment to Theory”. The Location of Culture. London, UK: Routledge, 1994

Blanchot, Maurice. “Literature and the Right to Death”. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. 300-30

Bourdieu, Pierre. From Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1809-14

Butler, Judith. “Bodies that Matter”. Bodies That Matter. New York and London: Routledge, 1993

----. From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge Classics, 2006. Pp. 27-56

Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975). Norton Anthology. Pp. 2039-55

Girard, René. “Triangular Desire”. The Girard Reader. Ed. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “The Desiring Machines”. Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London: New York: Routledge, 1999 (1977). Pp. 1-57

----. “What is a Minor Literature?” Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Pp. 16-27

De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City”. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. 91-110

De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1514-26

De Saussure, Ferdinand. From Course in General Linguistics. Norton Anthology. Pp. 960-76

Derrida, Jacques. From Of Grammatology. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1822-30

----. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Pp. 351-70

----. “Différance”. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Pp. 1-28

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1092-97

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Varorium”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 2071-80

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism” (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995. Pp. 195-230

----. “What is an Author?” Norton Anthology. Pp. 1622-36

----. from The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1648-66

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917-19). Gen. ed. James Strachey. London : Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1974

Frye, Northrop. “Archetypes of Literature”. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Genette, Gérard. “Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu”. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (2nd ed.). Eds. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. 121-38

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic.

Gramsci, Antonio. “The Formation of the Intellectuals”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1138-43

Greenblatt, Stephen. From The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. Norton Anthology. Pp. 2251-54

Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1748-58

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding”. The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 507-17

Haraway, Donna J. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 2269-98

Hebdige, Dick. “From Culture to Hegemony”. Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 5-22

Irigaray, Luce. From The Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Pp. 11-24

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction Between Text and Reader”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1673-81

Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance”; “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1258-68

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982

----. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke. University Press, 1999. Pp. 1-54

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage”; “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”; “The Signification of the Phallus”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1285-1310

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth”. Critical Theory Since Plato (3rd ed.). Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. New York: Thompson Wadsworth, 2005. Pp.
1120-31
Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Trace of the Other”. Deconstruction in Context. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1986

Lukács, György. “Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism”. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Pp. 101-12

Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Trans. Régis Durand. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984. Pp. 71-82.

Marx, Karl. from “Critique of Hegel, or Philosophy as a Whole”.

----. From Capital, Vol. I. Norton Anthology. Pp. 776-87

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense; From The Birth of Tragedy. Norton Anthology. Pp. 874-94 Plato, Republic, Book X.

----. Ion.

---. from Phaedrus (Socrates’ story of the gift of writing)

Said, Edward. Orientalism (1979). New York: Vintage, 1994

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. from Epistemology of the Closet. Norton Anthology. Pp. 2438-44

----. From Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. 1-26

Shelley, Percy. “A Defense of Poetry”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 699-716

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique”. Eds. and trans. Lemon and Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1965

Silverman, Kaja. from The Subject of Semiotics. Pp. 3-53

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Norton Anthology. Pp. 2197-2207

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. From Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. 5-54

West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference”

White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1712-28

Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1374-87

Woolf, Virginia. From A Room of One’s Own. Norton Anthology. Pp. 1021-29

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989

Film Theory

Abel, R. (1988). French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Andrew, J. D. (1984). Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.

Andrew, J. D. (1976). The Major Film Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. University of California Press, 1957.

Balázs, B. (1970). Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. New York: Dover Publications.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography: 83-89

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. P. Rosen. New York; Columbia University Press, 1985.

Bazin, André. (1967-71). What is Cinema? Vol. 1 & 2. Trans. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California Press

Bellour, Raymond. “The Obvious and the Code.” Screen 15 (Winter l974-75): 7- 17.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, Wisc.: University of Madison Press, 1985

----- & Carroll, N. (Eds.). (1996). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Branigan, E. (1984). Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film. Berlin New York: Mouton.

Burch, Noel (1981). Theory of Film Practice. Princeton, N.J.: University Press.

Carroll, Noel (1988). Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Comolli, Jean-Luc and Paul Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in (Ed.) J. Hollows, P. Hutchings, M. Jancovich, Film Studies Reader, London: Oxford University Press, (2000), pp. 197-200.

De Lauretis, Teresa (1987). Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. from Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image. Film Theory and Criticism (6th ed.). Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Pp. 240-69.

Doane, M. A. (1991). Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Easthope, A. (Ed.). (1993). Contemporary Film Theory. London New York: Longman.

Eisenstein, Sergei (1949), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, New York: Harcourt. Trans. Jay Leyda.

Eisenstein, Sergei (1942) The Film Sense. New York: Harcourt, Trans. Jay Leyda.

Heath, Stephen. “Notes on Suture.” Trans. by Kari Hanet. Screen 18 (Winter 1978).

Kaplan, E. A. (1997). Looking For the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge.

Kracauer, S. (1974). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lapsley, R., & Westlake, M. (1988). Film Theory: An introduction. Manchester New York: Manchester University Press distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press.

MacCabe, C. (1986). High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1990.

Mulvey, Laura. (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16 (3): 6–18.

Munsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: Appleton, 1916.

Rodowick, D. N. (1988). The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Rodowick, D. N. (1991). The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory. New York: Routledge.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1988.

Stam, R., & Miller, T. (Eds.). (1999). A Companion to Film Theory. Malden, Mass Oxford: Blackwell.

Williams, Linda (1981). Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.