Title: LITERARY STUDY: RESEARCH AND CRITICISM

PRQ:

Using a combination of lecture, discussion and frequent hands-on activities, this introduction to the major focuses on critical and methodological approaches to the study of literature.  Our primary goal is to explore a number of theoretical contexts for studying poetry, fiction, and drama including formal analysis, feminist and gender studies, cultural studies and new historicist, postcolonial, and reader response approaches.  To this end we will read a select set of literary texts, concentrating on the variety of methodological and theoretical angles we might apply to those texts.  By the end of the semester this exploration of interpretative tools should enable you to identify your own preferred critical approaches and apply them with some finesse as you position your own arguments within the scholarly debates on a given text.  

Students will write three essays with increasing levels of research and methodological difficulty, participate in peer review processes, and complete frequent in-class exercises and quizzes. Attendance and regular participation are mandatory. 

Texts may include but are not limited to: Texts and Contexts by Steven Lynn, How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton, and They Say/I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein.