This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

In this course, we will look at some major moments in and read some major works of literary criticism written in English. Beginning with Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” and moving through writing by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, A. C. Bradley, T. S. Eliot, W.E.B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Williams, Northrop Frye, C.L.R. James, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Eve Sedgwick, and others, we’ll read British and American literary criticism in order to do a few related things. First, we’ll look to these writers to consider some questions essential to thinking about literature and literary language: What is literature? What is it for? Is literature literary because it entertains, because it instructs, because it is ordered, beautiful, dangerous, or strange? What, if anything, makes literary language different from other kinds of language? And what analytic, descriptive, or interpretive methods are appropriate to what might be specific about literary language? Second, we’ll look to these writers at work, looking closely at how different critics engage with their different chosen objects, how they understand the practical and maybe impractical ends of criticism, and how they write about writing. We’ll see how Arnold reads and writes about Wordsworth, how Woolf reads and writes about Austen, how Coleridge, Bradley, and Wilde read and write about Shakespeare, how Morrison reads and writes about Melville, and how Henry James reads and writes about Henry James. Third, we’ll look at some ways in which the more or less continuous modern history of literary criticism in Britain and America responds to other histories—to revolution, reaction, political upheaval, world wars, cold wars, empire, decolonization, social movements, social networks, as well as the economic, political, and cultural vicissitudes of the modern university.

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Requirements class fulfills