There persists to this day in our discipline a serious split in research and critical self-definition around the concept of “Theory” which at least since the 1960s has undermined the once all-powerful philological and historicist methods of literary studies. Besides leading to acrimonious conferences and department meetings, this split has led to a real difference of critical technique and critical object within a discipline no longer even clearly unified as such. While this problem cannot easily be solved, graduate students (and advanced undergrads) need to be aware of its origins in the hopes of forging, in their generation, a more reasonable middle way between “theoretical” and “anti-theoretical” extremes. To this end, the seminar is designed to review key moments in the development of literary theory in the 20th century to discover how formalism, New Criticism, stylistics, “the linguistic turn” and structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxist and other historicisms, various “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the rise of various inter-disciplinary pursuits (with sociology, psychology and psycho-analysis, philosophy, and so forth) have contributed invaluably, but also dangerously, to the old fashioned raison d’etre of literary studies: the interpretation and evaluation of literary works. In reading these classic texts, from Shklovsky, Bakhtin, Brooks, Wimsatt, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Richards, Blanchot, and Sartre to Auerbach, Spitzer, Ricoeur, Barthes, Kristeva, Riffaterre, Eco, Goodman, de Man, Jauss, Iser, Fish, Todorov, Genette, and Jameson, and with inevitable reference to philosophers and theorists not particularly interested in literature per se but with significant influence on literary studies like Heidegger, Adorno, Gadamer, and Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, students will (hopefully) come to a proper appraisal of the history and state of literary studies as they prepare to enter the lists on their own.