Course details

Name: ENGL - 300

Title: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ENGLISH: BUILDING READERS

Section: 05

Semester: Fall - 2024

Credits: 3

Description:
All sections of "Critical Approaches to English" are inquiries 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 their 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 that are informed by literary theory and criticism. 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 section of the course, "Building Readers," examines case studies in the construction of readers, reading, and reading publics from the Renaissance to today. We'll ask how readers are shaped by cultural forces, by markets, by the interaction of different genres and different media, by struggles with oppression and identity, and, most often, by the interplay between the reader and the text itself. We will be traveling across an enormous span of history this semester, and across an enormous variety of writing, performance, and visual art: this may feel a little unstable, but that instability is part of our central focus on how practices of reading are constantly being transformed.

Schedule: Wednesday From 5:30 pm To 8:00 pm

Graduation requirements:

Teaching Faculty: Rzepka Adam (rzepkaa)

Is course canceled: No