Fall 2008 Courses

English 138-01: Literature in Theoretical Perspective (Allen)

T/TH 3:00-4:30pm HUM 212

Literature in Theoretical Perspectives provides an introduction to the techniques of literary analysis, with the primary goal of helping students become better critical readers of both literature and the theoretical contexts surrounding literature. We will focus on acquiring several fundamental practices of critical reading: 1) the practice of paying attention not only to the impressions and ideas that you receive as you read and reread, but also to the specific devices and methods which produce those impressions and ideas (even beyond the intentions of the author); 2) the practice of reading not only for plot, individual character, and theme, but also for the structures that determine those elements and which set them in motion across a field of other textual/social elements, such as cultures, ideologies, nationalities; 3) the practice of reading individual texts in a variety of interrelated contexts – historical, political, philosophical, linguistic, and biographical.

Employing these critical perspectives, we will examine a range of literary genres from authors Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison and Bertolt Brecht. Additionally, the course will introduce primary readings of major theorists (Marx, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, Butler and others), with the intention of enabling students to recognize and explore correspondences between important schools of thought, including historicism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminism/gender studies, race studies and postcolonialism.

Fall 2008 Course Listings