>From: sdcox@ucsd.edu (Dr. Stephen Cox, 619-534-4721)

                 Announcement of a seminar in

                THE LIBERAL CULTURAL TRADITION

                      Fall quarter 1994

  Open to undergraduate and graduate students from all departments

Literature/English 272: Cultural Traditions in English
                        The Liberal Cultural Tradition

cc: 209136  SEM A   Tuesday 5:30-8:20pm   LIT 3355

            Instructor: Professor Stephen Cox

Description:

  "Liberalism" has been defined in many ways. For the purposes of
this seminar, we'll define it quite broadly as a set of political
and cultural ideas in which the highest priority is given to
individual autonomy and freedom from coercive institutions. 
Liberalism of this type has been sharply criticized as naive or
worse by a long line of intellectual theorists, from Marx to the
deconstructivists.  But it remains a vigorous cultural force, whose
tradition deserves study.

  This seminar will try to identify the core values with which
liberalism began and to clarify the influence of those ideas on
such various movements as classical liberalism, modern liberalism,
and conservatism. The seminar will pursue the implications of
liberal theory for the study of literature and literary interpretation.

  We'll read some inportant theories by liberal thinkers of several
kinds, such as Locke, Madison, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Hayek, 
Paterson, Weaver, and Trilling. (Not a million pages of reading;
it's the ideas we're after.) We'll consider some contemporary work
that applies liberal assumptions to the study of literature, and
we'll read two novels that have important things to say about
liberal ideas and problems: Willa Cather's _O Pioneers!_ and
Joseph Conrad's _The Secret Agent_.