Course details

Name: ENGL - 300

Title: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ENGLISH

Section: 04

Semester: Spring - 2018

Credits: 3

Description:
This course, formerly titled Pursuits of English, is required for English majors and minors, and is an inquiry into what constitutes literary study: its subject matter and its underlying goals and methods. We study literary texts of various genres and formats, as well as literary criticism and theory; examine and expand our ways of reading, interpreting, responding to, and writing about texts; trace the relation of literary criticism to theory; consider the relation of literary study to issues of political power; discuss how and why mainstream critical approaches change over time; and develop independent habits of thought, research, discussion, and analytic writing. By the end of the course, you should be able to understand that a single text can and does have multiple meanings depending on the theoretical lens a reader uses.This particular instance of Pursuits explores the mutually dependent categories of the monstrous and the normal in fairy tales, Renaissance drama and its afterlives (Shakespeare's The Tempest and Césaire's A Tempest), and nineteenth-century fiction (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Along with our fictional texts, we will consider historical and cultural materials from the periods in which they were written, as well as theoretical lenses including those of feminism, gender studies, Marxism, and postcolonialism. Below are the books ordered for the course:

Hallett, Martin, and Barbara Karasek, eds. Folk and Fairy Tales. 4th Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008. 978-1551118987

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 4th Edition. NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011. 978-1408133477

Cesaire, Aime. A Tempest. Trans. Richard Miller. NY: TCG, 2002. 978-1559362108

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein Edited by J. Paul Hunter. 2 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 978-0393927931

Last updated on 2017-10-16 By Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)

Schedule: Wednesday,Friday From 1:00 pm To 2:15 pm

Graduation requirements:

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Teaching Faculty: Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)

Is course canceled: No