English 483: Theories of Literary Criticism

Course Description 

This course introduces you to major critical approaches to literature. The aims are threefold:

1. to help you develop and apply standards of judgment;

2. to help you recognize critical approaches to literature – and their underlying assumptions – in the scholarship you encounter as a student and scholar of literature;

3. to help you apply critical approaches to literature in your own written, scholarly work about literature.

You will become familiar with the authors of critical and theoretical works that influence contemporary criticism, and you will learn the key words and concepts associated with those authors and with different schools of thought. You will read and analyze several influential primary critical works, and you will read and analyze scholarly works from different critical or theoretical perspectives.

Students are expected to think for themselves, to form strong opinions, to disagree, to argue persuasively and eloquently when they speak and when they write.  

Course Documents 

Supplementary materials concerning literary theory

On the Web

In the library