ENGL 301

Spring 2018 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 16-May 2

CriticalApproaches to Lit&Text

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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 2018
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
48564	Lecture-Discussion	C	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	English Building	Basu, M	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/18-05/02/18 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.
48562	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	English Building	Gaedtke, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/18-05/02/18 Section Info: Critical Approaches to Literature This course will introduce students to the major theoretical and methodological approaches to literary and cultural studies that have evolved over the last few decades. Our readings will include some of the foundational texts of structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and sexuality theory, disability studies, postcolonial and critical theory. We will ask how these theories have adjusted the goals and methods of literary studies, and we will also critically assess their ideological agendas and practical implications. Finally, we will determine how best to “use” and engage with theory in our own writing and research as we test their applications to several short works of literature.
48566	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	English Building	Nazar, H	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/18-05/02/18 Section Info: This course invites reflection on what it is we do when we read and write about literature. Is there something distinctive about literary language and the experience of reading literary texts? What is the difference between a literary work and a scientific treatise, between fiction and journalism? What do we need to know about an author to properly understand his or her work? Does the study of literature have any relevance outside the academy? English 301 explores these and related questions and considers some of the most influential responses they have received since the 1940s, from critical schools including formalism, historicism, materialism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonialism, and critical race studies. In one way or another, these critical theories hone in on the status of human beings as “authors,” not only of literary works but also of their own lives and the world around them. And we will see that many schools of theory are critical of the idea, which they attribute to “Enlightenment humanism,” that human beings are self-authorizing agents or autonomous subjects. We will make this concern with authorship and authority a focus of the course, one that will help us navigate the wide-ranging debates that have shaped the theoretical study of literature in the past seventy-plus years. Along the way, we will read short literary works, in order to gauge how good a job theory does of interpreting literature.