L371 9965 CRITICAL PRACTICES
Jonathan Elmer

1:25p-2:15p MWF (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.  Open to English majors
only.

PREREQUISITE: L202 with grade of C- or better.  NOTE: The English
Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite.  Students who
have not completed L202 with a grade of C- or better will have their
registration administratively cancelled.

This course is intended to introduce students to a range of critical
approaches and methodologies in the analysis and interpretation of
texts.  Our approach will be to access the more theoretical concerns
through their instantiation in actual “critical practices” – that
is, essays and interpretations of complex language.  We will
consider approaches that understand literature as a sociological
phenomenon, Marxist interpretation, cultural studies,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and queer theory.  We will foreground
the question throughout the semester of what value and what pleasure
might be had from performing the intellectual labor of criticism and
interpretation.  Authors we may encounter include Susan Sontag,
Herman Melville, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, Kenneth
Burke, Sianne Ngai, Mark Twain, Pierre Macherey, J.M. Coetzee,
Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, and Jacques Derrida.

Students will be asked to write three short papers, and a longer
interpretive essay at semester’s end.  Occasional quizzes are also
likely.