In this course we will confront the problem of English literature. To the historicist frame, the discipline emerged only in the nineteenth century, or mid-modernity, together with accompliced concepts like author, work, period. To poststructuralism and postcoloniality, the critique of the modern episteme that puts disciplinary reason to question, its emergence follows a colonial imperative, interpellation, the differantial constitution of human subjectivity into civilized, barbarian and savage; and instantiates the humanities, the disciplines that format the human, in its second iteration. Put differently, the story of literature is not that of an innocent gathering of objects (literary works) into a novel taxonomy but one of transformation, force, epistemic violence. This course serves as an introduction to poststructuralism by engaging the questions of literature, disciplinarity, reading, writing. Authors will include: Althusser, Austin, Barthes, Crenshaw, Derrida, Foucault, Kant, Locke, Macaulay, Nietzsche, Shelley, Spivak.