ENGL 301

Spring 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 spring 2020
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
48562	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	127 English Building	Oh, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/20-05/06/20 Section Info: This required course for the English major will introduce students to a wide range of modern literary theory and criticism including new criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, reader response, postcolonial theory, new historicism, feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism. While I will provide some mini-lectures, students will primarily be responsible for analyzing and discussing the critical theory and practicing using the theories to interpret various literary works.
48566	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	115 English Building	Hansen, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/20-05/06/20 Section Title: Critical Approaches to Lit Section Info: Critical Approaches to Literature 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.
48564	Lecture-Discussion	X	12:00PM -12:50PM	MWF	119 English Building	Basu, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/20-05/06/20 Section Info: On the books, this course promises to introduce you to the basic terrains of literary criticism, or more specifically, it promises to offer a survey of the major critical and theoretical movements that have influenced the study of literature in the last half a century, taking you through a whirlwind tour of new criticism, structuralism and narratology, deconstruction and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, cultural studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and reader response. This particular section of the course will indeed introduce you to the above, but it will do so, with the literary text always at the centre of the discussion. In other words, you will read about the emergence of a specific theoretical movement, and then you will read a short story or novel or folk tale and analyze it such that you yourself may practice the critical trend you have just learnt about. In some cases, you will also read an essay that models such an anlysis so that there will be an already existing template for your practice. Finally, the course also asks that you read and analyze film versions of the texts we will be reading. Thus, popular media and film criticism will also be a part of the critical/theoretical trends that you will study.