ENGL 301

Spring 2015 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 spring 2015
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
48564	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -1:50PM	MWF	131 English Building	Basu, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/15-05/06/15 Section Info: ENGL 301 is restricted to English majors. This course will introduce you to the basic terrains of literary criticism. Like all academic disciplines, literary criticism comes with systems of thought and their technical vocabularies. This is because like all modes of organized thinking, it relies on precision and nuance. Top level literary criticism involves a world of variables and concerns, like society, production, history, psychology, gender and class identities, ideologies, sexualities, cultures, and ideas. In exploring this terrain, we will understand how languages and intellectual environments shape us; it will also tell us how we historically came into being as individuals and communities. Apart from a textbook that will introduce us to the basics of literary theory, we will also read and work with a few essays, poems, and short stories. You will be required to turn in 3 papers, answer quizzes, and write a final examination. 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).
48565	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	131 English Building	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/15-05/06/15 Section Info: ENGL 301 is restricted to English majors. 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).
48562	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	259 English Building	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/20/15-05/06/15 Section Info: ENGL 301 is restricted to English majors. This course will introduce students to the various issues and debates central to contemporary literary studies. If you have ever wondered why people interpret certain texts, and even certain events and actions, as they do, then this is the course for you. The class will begin by exploring the ways in which three profoundly different thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, introduced a peculiarly suspicious form of reading, a way of interrogating texts and the world that looks beneath the surface and doubts that what you see is what you get. We will go on to explore how literary critics in the 20th century worked to map this Modern ?hermeneutic of suspicion? onto political, psychological, and philosophical issues that still have an effect on us today. Finally, the course will engage with literature?s relationship to questions of sexual and racial difference, of power, and of technology. Requirements will include active class-participation, weekly journal entries, two short papers, and two exams. Texts will include Freud?s Interpretation of Dreams, Marx?s The Communist Manifesto, Nietzsche?s Genealogy of Morals and a Course Packet with essays by critics in the Gender, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and Post-Structuralist traditions. 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).