Official Course Description:
Two central questions—what is literature? and how do people critique it?—frame this course, guiding our study of some basic theories of the relationships peculiar to a literary work, its author, its audience members, and the worlds in which these entities meet. Reading and writing assignments are designed to meet two interrelated goals: to explore literary ways of knowing by practicing different methods of literary analysis (including romanticism, formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism), and to situate these theoretical developments amid major social developments of the past two centuries (including marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial struggles). By the end of the semester, students should be able to explain how and why no reading or writing can ever be free of theory.
My Description:
This course teaches not only how to view theory and criticism in literature, but why it exists as well, providing one with a more comprehensive view as to how we interact with writing everyday, and why we interact with it in the ways that we do.
