ENGL 200

Fall 2021 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 23-Dec 8

Introduction to the Study of Literature and Culture

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to the study of literature in the twenty-first century. This course will expand your sense of what literature is and where it happens, including discussion of old and new literary forms (from novels, poems, and plays to comic books, video games, and films). Along the way, students will explore some of the literary and cultural opportunities (such as author readings, scholarly talks, and performances) available to them on a large public university campus, with two goals in mind: to develop your critical interpretive skills and to acquaint you with the discipline of literary studies as it is being practiced all around us today, both inside and outside the conventional classroom.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 200 class schedule data for fall 2021
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32277	Lecture-Discussion	D	11:00AM -11:50AM	MWF	English Building	Pollock, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: Fall 2021 – ENGL 200: Introduction to the Study of Literature and Culture - This course is designed to help students develop key interpretive skills and a knowledge base that will prepare them for success in 300- and 400-level courses in literary and cultural studies. We will engage with powerful works of literature from a range of different genres (including fiction and poetry), paying close attention to how the form of each text impacts our understanding of its meaning; we will build up a critical vocabulary for articulating persuasive, detailed and evidence-based arguments about the readings; and we will think about interpretation itself as a form of action with ethical and social implications. Possible authors include Richard Blanco, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marianne Moore, Suzan-Lori Parks, Craig Santos Perez, Mary Shelley, Adrienne Su and Natasha Trethewey. Requirements: three essay projects, weekly informal writing, and regular class participation.
41879	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -2:50PM	MWF	Gregory Hall	Pollock, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: Fall 2021 – ENGL 200: Introduction to the Study of Literature and Culture - This course is designed to help students develop key interpretive skills and a knowledge base that will prepare them for success in 300- and 400-level courses in literary and cultural studies. We will engage with powerful works of literature from a range of different genres (including fiction and poetry), paying close attention to how the form of each text impacts our understanding of its meaning; we will build up a critical vocabulary for articulating persuasive, detailed and evidence-based arguments about the readings; and we will think about interpretation itself as a form of action with ethical and social implications. Possible authors include Richard Blanco, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marianne Moore, Suzan-Lori Parks, Craig Santos Perez, Mary Shelley, Adrienne Su and Natasha Trethewey. Requirements: three essay projects, weekly informal writing, and regular class participation.
41926	Lecture-Discussion	Q1	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	English Building	Loughran, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: ENGL 200: Intro to Literary Study, CRN 41926, Section Q1, TR, 11-1215 - Trish Loughran - This is a course about what it means to read literature in the twenty-first century. The literary critic Frederic Jameson has written “there have been few moments in modern social history in which people have felt more powerless” or more dismal about their future. If this is true, what then is literature, the supposed practice of representing and reviving life, in the 21st century? Do people in books feel more real than people in life (or quite the opposite)? How about in visual art, film, or music . . . or in something as small and ephemeral as a photograph? As we follow this expanding category of literature, which today can include all of these things (and many others), we will ask what it can do for us and what we can do with it. In answering this question, we will focus heavily on the question of how literary critics tend to approach these diverse objects of study—in short, on modes of reading and styles of interpretation, from “formalism” to “historicism” to “cultural theory.” By the end of the course, you should be able to describe these three approaches...and know a bit about how to practice them. We will do this individually and en masse, as a cadre of sympathetically-linked co-readers: a class committed to thinking about what it means to need, love, and use literature today, on planet earth and at the University of Illinois, circa 2021.
32268	Lecture-Discussion	Q2	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	Speech & Hearing Science Bldg	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: Have you ever been gobsmacked by a piece of writing that makes you ask yourself for days: How’d they do that? Have you ever entered a museum only to find yourself at a loss for the strange bends of reality hanging on the wall? I wager such wonderment about the nature of art is what brought you here in the first place. As we harness that feeling, this class will help you read some of the most monumental art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with Impressionism and ending with black theater, you will practice four interpretive skills, each fundamental to literary study: close-reading, playing with theory, historization, and something we’ll call “imperfecting,” learning how to free yourself from the pressures of perfection, learning how to play. You will come to appreciate the way forms of art that at first seem far apart deeply shape one another. We will not only read poems, paintings, films, photographs, plays, essays, short stories, and a novel side by side, but we will also read side by side works from opposite ends of history. For example, we’ll read the contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei next to Monet, Picasso next to art from Ancient Egypt, Kafka next David Blane!—we’ll conduct short-circuits, tiny cultural combustions between things never meant to cross. These short-circuits will enliven our central question: what exactly is art, how has it been defined in practice and in reflection?
45880	Lecture-Discussion	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	English Building	Wood, G	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: ENG 200: Introduction to the Study of Literature - Poetry and spoken-word performance mark the origins of what we call literature, and remain its core aesthetic. In our opening poetry unit, we will read, recite, and analyze the verbal art of a suite of American poets, from Emily Dickinson to William Carlos Williams. The theater – for centuries a principal cultural marketplace until the modern advent of film and television – combines poetry with performance, and has vividly documented human conflict and social change since the Ancient Greeks. For our drama unit, we will read Shakespeare’s dark comedic study of Western racism and tribalism, The Merchant of Venice, and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a poignant elegy for rural life as Russia slides toward revolution. The cultural necessity of literature lies in its window into human psychology – it’s a way of making the private public – and for the last century and more fiction has taken the foremost role in constructing our collective literary imaginary, richly populated by introverts, misfits, and criminal masterminds, as in the stories of Patricia Highsmith and Alice Munro with which our course concludes. Through the semester, emphasis in both class and written assignments will be on how literary language works, the intersections of literary and cultural change, and developing skills in the close reading of texts.