ENG 505 Literary Theory, Criticism, and Research
The goal of the course is to expand students’ knowledge in literary theory and to provide the vocabulary and analytical tools for critical reading, writing, and theorizing. The course offers a history of literary criticism, with an emphasis on the most prominent theorists, texts, schools, and ideas. The course covers both the development of critical theories of literature and the more recent approaches, and covers major writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, Sidney, Kant, Coleridge, Emerson, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, as well as more current ideas and debate, such as new historicism, ethnicity and race studies, feminist theory, and postmodernism. Although the course emphasizes both reading and writing literary criticism, students also develop research methods and gain the necessary skills to study and teach critical theory.