EN 466 LITERARY THEORY

STUDY QUESTIONS FOR GRAFF ESSAY

1. Why is it difficult to constitute a liberal arts curriculum under more or less democratic conditions?
2. On what grounds did some traditional humanists first embrace the idea of theory?
3. What 2 intellectual frameworks, in a strained union, gave birth to academic literary studies? Why was this union strained?
4. Why have so many of the exemplary Arnoldian humanists ended up as bitter critics of the academic profession?
5. What is the field-coverage principle? When did it get started and why?
6. What are two institutional advantages this principle presented? How did these advantages become liabilities?
7. What role did New Criticism play in this state of affairs?
8. What does Graff see as the problem with the deconstructivist blief that all idealizations are self-destructing and illegitimate, or the Marxist belief that all institutional patterns can be explained as power claims?

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