01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW
West Building 1001
Section Information for Spring 2020
In this class, we focus on core skills and issues in reading literary works and writing about them. The aim of the class is to develop our understanding of and our ability to perform three things: first, we learn to do close, analytical readings of individual literary works; then, we build on close reading by undertaking, secondly, analysis of intertextual dynamics, implications, relationships between a literary work and its literary and historical contexts; and, thirdly, close, critical analysis of secondary scholarship.
So, we will be interested in questions such as the following: What do we mean by close, analytical reading of a literary work? Why or when is it called for? How do we carry it out? What kinds of interpretive questions arise from such analytical reading and motivate our analyses of literary works? How do we transform our analytical reading into written literary analysis? What kind of work should a literary analysis do? What kinds of interpretive questions require other kinds of inquiry and analysis (beyond analytical reading of the individual work)? In particular, when and in what ways does it become eligible or necessary to place the work under consideration alongside other texts and contexts? What forms do intertextual and contextual implications take? So, too, what use can or should we make of literary scholarship about a literary work we are analyzing? What does close, critical reading of existing scholarship look like? How do we situate our own written analysis in relation to existing scholarship? The questions and materials we will work with are centered on literary works and literary criticism, but the issues of interpretation, analysis, and written argument apply much more broadly to critical engagement with all kinds of texts.
Because the course is focused on process and learn-by-doing, (as well as learning by example and analysis,) the syllabus and reading materials are kept somewhat thin and flexible. We’ll read articles to help us understand some of the issues involved in this kind of interpretive practice and we’ll look at exemplary close, analytical readings, but we’ll focus on our own hands-on engagement with a group of literary works and our construction of analytical, intertextual, and critically-informed readings of these works.
The aim of the course is to help you become better readers and interpreters of literary works and of literary scholarship, by understanding better the challenges and requirements of close, analytical engagement with a literary work. The hope is that you will be given a good foundation from which to continue to build on what you gain from this class through all of your subsequent classes in literary and other textual study.
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Credits: 3
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