Text: Literary Criticism (Charles E. Bressler)
Description: The course is designed to gain a working understanding of the major critical movements in the modern period. These critical modes are meant to be useful tools for analyzing both literary texts and popular culture. This will be accomplished by first gaining a working understand of the critical movements, beginning with New Criticism and moving through New Historicism. This course is an in-depth investigation of modes of reading which will serve English majors, Communications majors and anyone interested in how we've attached significance to language that comes through us via novels, plays, poems, films and mass media.
In essense, you will be asked to implementwhat you are learning. This will be accomplished by your applicationof theory to text(s), the only true measure of your learning. So this is a hands on course: you will read, we will discuss, then put into action what we've learned. It is your responsibility, therefore, to provide the literary texts to be used: I will not assign these.
In order to accomplish the writing, it will be essential to do some background research. This will be done, for the most part, in-class and via the Internet.