The School of Criticism and Theory will once hold its tenth annual conference this summer at Dartmouth.
The school brings together between 50 and 80 internationally known scholars and literary critics for six weeks of seminars on literature and literary theory during June and July.
Graduate students and junior faculty members from universities in the United States and around the world also participate in the courses.
Courses will investigate the frontiers of psychoanalysis, hate speech and attempts to limit it, recent literary theory, the geography and pathology of the European novel, and the ethics and storytelling function of classic psychoanalytic cases.
This year's session signals the first time a Dartmouth professor will single-handedly teach an entire School of Criticism and Literary Theory course.
English professor Donald Pease will conduct a course examining narrative figures operating as "witnesses" in American literature from the antebellum period to the Civil War.
"Professor Pease is the first Dartmouth professor to teach a course in the school, and he was selected because of his reputation and prestige in the world of criticism and theory outside of Dartmouth,"said Keith Walker, Dartmouth liason to the school and chair of the African and Afro-American Studies Department in a press release.
Pease's course, titled "Critical Witnesses: Vanishing Mediators at the Crossroads of Literature and History," will run over two weeks and will discuss the works of Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, Frederic Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others.
"We try to focus on the issues that are most exciting and the ones that are on the cutting edge of literary theory," Walker said.
The School of Criticism and Literary Theory is independent from the College.
Past participants have included M.H. Abrams, Northrop Frye, Julia Kristeva, Helen Vendler, Michael Riffaterre, and Elaine Showalter. Students and fellows have represented universities such as Paris, Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Virginia, Berkeley and Columbia.
