ENGL 301

Fall 2020 All Classes

All Classes

Introduction to Critical Theory

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Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to the critical frameworks and methods that have had the greatest impact on the field of literary studies. Students will read, discuss, and write about numerous theoretical approaches, including (but not limited to) critical race studies, ecocriticism, feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and structuralism. No previous background with theory is required.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor. For majors only.

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ENGL 301 class schedule data for fall 2020
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
50625	Online	C	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	n.a.	Parker, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Section Info: Critical Approaches to Literature - “How to Interpret Literature: An Introduction to Contemporary Critical Theory.” This course is required for English majors and minors and best not delayed for long. Seniors in the course regret not taking it sooner. Literature students write, think, and speak literary criticism, and this course sets out to make that process more interesting and—eventually—more fun. In the last half century, critics have repeatedly reinvented literary and cultural criticism in ways that change how we interpret what we read and how we understand our daily lives. We will study such critical movements as new criticism, structuralism and narratology, deconstruction and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, cultural studies, race studies, postcolonial studies, disability studies, and environmental criticism. Expect some difficult reading, but we will work through it together. This course prepares students for future literature classes, and it helps us understand and question the world around us and the entire project of critical thinking and reading. Attendance will be crucial, because we learn these concepts both by reading and by working with the concepts together. If you like to stay silent in class, or if you do not attend class regularly, then do not take this section. Class time will focus on discussion, not on lecture, so you need to do the reading and join your classmates in the room and in the discussion.
50626	Online	M	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	n.a.	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Section Info: In this course, we will survey major developments in the history of thinking hard from the eighteenth century to today. To cope with the unwieldy and sometimes stupefying abstraction called ”critical theory,” we will generally read short, iconic selections, thinking for the most part in broad, vivid strokes, with a few full texts interspersed for depth and texture. Most importantly (for newcomers to such material), we will work through these readings in a way that makes sense, challenges you, and does not put any of us to sleep (or drive us crazy). This is, in short, an introduction to the history of Big Ideas, and any lively, alert, thinking reader should be able to keep up. A large part of this class is about what theory says. But an even bigger part is simply about learning how to read theory. And we will do that by doing what we do in every English class: close reading the text itself.
54838	Online	P	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	n.a.	Oh, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 Section Info: Introduction to Critical Theory - This course will offer students an intellectual survey of modern critical theory. It will introduce students to the movements and debates that have shaped literary studies and offer students a toolkit through which to interpret literary and cultural texts. The theories we will explore include: new criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, new historicism and cultural studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism. While we will have a small shared archive of short texts like Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” students will mainly be responsible for reading and discussing the primary theory. Together we will consider the intellectual trends that have shaped our understandings of language, representation, the human mind, gender and sexuality, capitalism, race, the environment, and power.
54605	Online	Q	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	n.a.	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/20-12/09/20 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. For the most part, this course charts a history of ideas, and although we will occasionally read and refer to poems, films, and stories, the bulk of our coursework will revolve around reading, discussing, and writing about essays. Requirements will include active class participation, weekly journal entries, two short papers, and two exams.