UWA Handbook 2024

Unit Overview

Description

This unit offers an introduction to key methodological issues in the humanities. Pivotal humanistic disciplines such as literary studies and history have continually confronted the problem as to whether the texts they interpret constitute data for objective analysis (e.g. the historical 'archive') or whether the interpreter themselves inevitably contributes to the 'meaning' of the literary text or historical document. Primarily focusing on interpretive debates in literary and cultural studies, the unit examines a range of approaches to interpretation and analysis in the humanities that have sought to differentiate humanistic methods from scientific inquiry. Students study and seek to historically contextualise important critical approaches to interpretation that have sought to define the relationship between interpreter and text and between a text and its author and social context, including hermeneutics, formalism, reader-reception theory, Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, feminism and queer studies, and postcolonial theory. Theorists to be studied might include Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer, Hayden White, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Eve Sedgwick and Cathy Caruth.

Students develop and complete an intensive research project on their chosen theoretical area, and articulate and defend positions in literary and cultural theory. These forms of assessment equip students with advanced research and communication skills that have applicability across a diversity of professional careers.

Credit

6 points

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) understand the fundamental critical concepts and debates in contemporary critical theory; (2) learn the historical and social contexts of these concepts and debates, that is, how these concepts have been influenced by, and in turn informed, various important social movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; (3) take informed and critical positions within these debates and situate these positions within the critical tradition; (4) apply theoretical strategies and insights into the interpretation of cultural texts; (5) express original arguments, together with research methodologies, approaches and findings, coherently and logically in oral and written formats; and (6) undertake and present research in groups efficiently and creatively, develop communication skills that benefit group discussion of critical theory and its applications.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) interpretation exercise; (2) topic proposal and research project; and (3) tutorial participation. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Associate Professor Tanya Dalziell and Associate Professor Alison Bartlett

Unit rules

Advisable prior study

for Social Research Methods students: ANTH4103 Knowing Social Realities: Theoretical Foundations.
SOCS5003 Research Design and Resourcing.
SOCS5005 Social Research Ethics

Contact hours

3 hours per teaching week

Texts

Learning Management System (LMS) or Course Materials Online (CMO) electronic availability of key texts likely