Literary and Cultural Theory: Interdisciplinary Methods and the First Book

This course asks questions about interdisciplinarity in relation to professional structures of recognition. We analyze prize-winning monographs which were "first books," first, to begin to build our own toolkits, and second to explore which works become "prize-winning." The "firstness" of our books is a point of departure, even as we place them in genealogies: theoretical, critical, archival. We ask: what is interdisciplinarity in each book and over time? what methods carry over between fields? what makes books 'field-defining'?