ENGL 301

Fall 2017 All Classes

All Classes

CriticalApproaches to Lit&Text

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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 2017
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
50625	Lecture-Discussion	C	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	119 English Building	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/28/17-12/13/17 Section Info: 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.
54605	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	104 English Building	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/28/17-12/13/17 Section Info: 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.
50626	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	127 English Building	Loughran, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/28/17-12/13/17 Section Info: Theory: the final frontier - At least that’s how many English majors seem to feel! In this course, we will survey major developments in the history of thinking hard from the eighteenth century to today. As in any theory course, a number of major -ISMs (and their relatives) will appear regularly on the docket to vex us with the complexity—including materialism, historicism, structuralism (and its posts-), queer theory, and postcolonialism. To cope with the vertigo such -ISMs produce, we will generally read short, iconic selections, with a few full texts interspersed for depth and texture. And we will do our best to work through this material in a way that: a) makes sense, b) challenges you, and c) does not put any of us to sleep (or drive us crazy). This is, in short, an introduction to the history of such ideas, and any game, thinking reader should be able to keep up. 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.