L202 5086 KARMA LOCHRIE
Literary Interpretation

2:30p-3:45p TR (25 students) 3 CR. - Satisfies A&H Distribution Requirement

College intensive writing section. Open to majors and declared minors only.

“I too, dislike it,” writes poet Marianne Moore about poetry, “There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle./ Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in/ it after all, a place for the genuine.” This course aims at displacing student fears of poetry with the healthy contempt that Moore writes about, with the aim of finding “a place for the genuine” in literary analysis. As an introduction to the principles of literary criticism, this course will combine a study of the formalist and linguistic techniques of close reading with a preview (to L371) of some of the theories of literary criticism, including gender, queer, cultural studies, and postcolonial. The literary texts we will be reading will fall under the topic, misfits in utopia, including Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and a movie of the class’s choosing. Requirements include four papers and a final exam, along with in- class presentations.