ENGL 301

Fall 2014 All Classes

All Classes

CriticalApproaches to Lit&Text

Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to influential critical methods and to the multiple frameworks for interpretation as illustrated by the intensive analysis of selected texts. For majors only.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement and ENGL 200.

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ENGL 301 class schedule data for fall 2014
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
50625	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -1:50PM	MWF	150 English Building	Foote, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/14-12/10/14 Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors. English minors can add with approval from our advising office. This class is designed to introduce you to multiple ways people talk about, interpret, and analyze all kinds of textsliterary, historical, and social. We will look at examples of different critical and interpretive schools, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, Marxism, feminisms, psychoanalysis, queer theory, reader-response, and new criticism. As we read how critics have read texts, we will keep in mind how they have framed and elaborated the stakes of arguing about interpretation, and we will pay close attention to the ways that some interpretive vocabularies have become commonsensical, while others have been charged with being too political or too obscure. This class will give you a working vocabulary to talk about critical theory, a sense of the major issues that have been debated between and within various schools of critical theory, and a history of the relationship between literature and various interpretive schools. The class will not give you a secret decoder ring, but it will give you a way to talk about secret decoder rings and why people have struggled over them. The requirements of the class include perfect attendance, participation, a number of short essays, a presentation, and a final exam. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
50626	Lecture-Discussion	Q	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	131 English Building	Mohamed, F	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/14-12/10/14 Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors. English minors can add with approval from our advising office. Ten Takes on Tragedy - Every interpretive act requires a set of interpretive standards and assumptions. To say that an artifact is beautiful implies that there is such a thing as beauty, that the critic knows what it is and can identify its constitutive elements in a way that is defensible. The same is true when we say that a work shows great verbal art, betrays class or gender bias, is a terrible bore, stems from the concerns of its time, or reveals the artist?s feelings about his mother. Each of these can say something productive, but only if it is fully aware of its own strengths and limitations. The aim of this course is to cultivate the kind of critical sophistication that comes of making the interpretive act knowledgeable and reflexive: carefully to select the lens through which we view a text, to know its clarifying and distorting properties, to grind it into a fit for the frames of our own critical and intellectual aspirations. The critical enterprise is especially fraught, and so especially fascinating, when it contemplates that genre placing interpretation, choice, and misapprehension at the center of its concerns: tragedy. Throughout the European tradition, tragedy emerges time and again as the most compelling object of philosophically-inflected inquiry into literature. We shall mirror that focus in this course by looking at ten philosophical takes on tragedy, ranging from Aristotle, to Immanuel Kant, to Walter Benjamin, to Julia Kristeva. The raw materials for this critical discussion will be such tragedies as Sophocles? Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Shakespeare?s Hamlet, and Alain Badiou?s Incident at Antioch. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
54605	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	131 English Building	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/14-12/10/14 Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors. English minors can add with approval from our advising office. This course will introduce you to some of the most significant contemporary interpretive methods in the study of literary texts. However, it will do so always keeping in mind the primacy of the literary text itself. At the center of the class then, we will have at least two representative literary texts which generated excitement, criticism, and debate in their own times as well as later. With these texts and their times as the ?stuff? of our business, we will study such critical movements as new criticism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminist and gender studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and reader response theory. As it prepares students for future literature classes, this course helps us understand and question the relations between reading literary texts and thinking critically, and more profoundly perhaps, between reading, criticism, and the practices involved in putting ourselves irrevocably amidst others. This course is required for English literature majors. Most English majors should take English 301 in the second semester of their sophomore year or the first semester of their junior year, but only if they have already taken several literature courses. The most common complaint about this class comes from seniors who regret not taking it sooner. It is strongly recommended that all English and Teaching of English majors take ENGL 300 and ENGL 301 BEFORE taking any other 300- or 400-level courses. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).