This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

We write in college: that has always been true. But why do we write the way we do? This seminar will survey, historicize, and challenge some of the most cherished norms of college writing from the perspective of certain “flashpoints” and critical issues: originality and plagiarism; reading and “close” reading; linguistic hegemony and language justice; style and poetics; grading and grammar; translation and collaboration. We’ll focus on college writing in U.S. departments of English in the twentieth century, as these hosted some of the most active, sometimes contentious, and in many cases ongoing debates about language, literature, and composition. But we’ll also reach back into history, looking at the relationship between Montaigne’s Essais and the college application essay; the eighteenth-century copyright laws that helped shape how we think about originality and academic dishonesty; the emergence of close reading practices in the 1920s and 30s that changed how we write literary arguments; and the history of still-unsettled ideas about access, exclusion, value, and collaboration that influence our grading practices. Over the semester, seminar participants will create their own critical projects designed to help us imagine how these issues might play out over our own century.

All readings will be available on bCourses or provided in class.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills