English: Literary Theory (A)

About ENGL 2000 A

Survey of literary and cultural theory introducing a variety of major approaches to the interpretation of literature. Required for all English majors and minors. Pre/Co-requisite: ENGL 1500.

Notes

Pre/Co-requisite: ENGL 1500. Junior and senior ENGL, SEE majors and ENGL minors only until Wednesday, April 9th; then ENGL SEE majors and ENGL minors only during the first week registration

Section Description

“Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.”
-- Barbara Johnson, “Nothing Fails like Success” (1985)

This survey course offers English Majors an intensive introduction to the conceptual side our discipline, sharing a variety of the methods and problems that have characterized the activity of interpreting literature from the time of Plato to the present. Questions like: what is literature? what role does language play in the formation of (thinking, situated, desiring and embodied) human subjects? What is the relationship among the terms we use to describe our intellectual work variously as critical scholarship, interpretation, and analytical critique? How do literary texts differ from other uses of language to communicate? What role does/can literature play in upholding social order or in changing it?

Beyond basic literacy of knowing what most of the words mean and moving from left to right, what does it mean to be able to “read” literary texts productively? “Close reading” — the overarching key term and skill you have studied in ENGL 1500, and the basis of our major and intellectual discipline — is itself arguably a metaphor that involves a displacement. Close reading actually already involves two things that come in a sense “before” and “after” we read: concept formation and the practice of interpretive writing. If we can’t “consult the oracle” for answers to the meaning of a text —as a famous American critic once quipped—what is to guide the quest for meaning in literary studies? What different sorts of techniques have counted in scholarly communities as good or valid reading practice over the years? From a wider cultural lens, what historical, conceptual, or social forces have shaped the role of literature in society and constrained the seemingly boundless range of possible interpretations of the idea of literature as a whole, and of specific texts? Literary critics draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies when reading texts, and part of the work of literary scholarship is the construction, revision, and refinement of critical frameworks. This course will explore the practice of literary and cultural theory by introducing you to a set of important approaches and terms, but even more than that by cultivating a practice of intellectually engaged critical thinking.
Literary and Cultural Theory have never been more urgent than they are now. We live in a time when economic globalization and rapid and increasingly catastrophic ecological change make it both possible and urgently necessary to consider frameworks that start beyond the individual, requiring creative, original and collaborative thought: perspectives as wide as the “Anthropocene” era of our earth, and deep time; and reading methods (new and old) that draw from both large-scale and attentively small frames for literary study. In addition to learning about major theoretical movements and reading many classic theory texts, in this course we will rethink some major ideas about the scope and methods of literary theory—adding a complementary perspective to the craft of “close” reading and writings you have learned as an English major in ENGS 1500, “Intro to Literary Studies.”
In this course we will not engage Literary Theory solely as an interpretive means to provides approaches to individual literary texts (i.e., there is a whole lot of theory and not a lot of literature on our syllabus!). However, a focus on two major genres of literature—short lyric poetry and short fictional narrative texts—runs throughout the course readings and discussion

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