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RUSS-043 Gateway: Introduction to Literary Theory
Spring only
(Taught in English. Serves as second course for humanities/writing and fulfills English Department "Gateway" requirement.)
This course introduces students to a number of primarily twentieth-century critical approaches to literature: Formalism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Postmodernism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, Feminist criticism, Post-colonial criticism, and Hermeneutics. The course will provide an overview of each critical approach, but it does not pretend to be exhaustive. Instead it will be more in the nature of a survey of critical theory but in relation to a shared set of concerns. It will proceed largely in chronological order so that students see criticism as an inter-related and on-going dialogue.
Discussion of each approach will focus on theoretical premises and implications and will investigate argumentation and grounds for critique. The aim is to illustrate the parameters (the range and domain) of each approach and how presuppositions shape conclusions.
In addition students will analyze selected literary texts from the point of view of each of the approaches. The application of theory to literature will illustrate how theory can enrich our understanding of a literary text and reveal its multidimensional nature. All critical and literary texts (stories, poems, excerpts) are in English.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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