English 2140Introduction to Literary Studies

The following guidelines and syllabus are intended as a general guide for teachers of this course. The guidelines (1-4) are intended to provide teachers with a sense of what outcomes thedepartment desires for these courses and to suggest some means of reaching those outcomes. The syllabus (5) is one that I (Paul Schmidt) might use to teach this course. Every instructor willhave his or her own emphases and ideas of how best to train new English majors.

English 2140 is intended to prepare students to be astute readers of literature, aware of themultiplicity of critical stances that inform the reading process. Students should leave the coursewith a keen sense of what constitutes evidence in critical argument and with some notion of thevarious vocabularies that have evolved in relation to particular schools of criticism.

The course should have the following features:

1. It will be required of all majors, whether they aretransfers or not.

2. It will be an absolute prerequisite for all other English

major courses (3000-4000) taken by majors. 3. Students from other disciplines do not need this

prerequisite except at the discretion of the professor forthe major course.

4. There will be a heavy emphasis on writing about literature

throughout the course. Students will learn MLAparenthetical documentation style.

5. The course will require a handbook to introduce students to

literary vocabulary they will need as majors. 6. It will introduce students to a variety of critical

approaches to literature. 7. As often as possible, this class will be taught by full-

time, tenure-track faculty.

Terms and Approaches: The following is a sample of the kinds of terms and approachesthat may be emphasized in the course.

Terms: aesthetics, allegory, allusion, ambiguity, anti-hero, archetype, authorship, autotelic,avant-garde, ballad, biographical fallacy, Calvinism, canon, carpe diem, character,classicism, climax, couplet, comedy, conceit, convention, diction, didacticism, digression,drama, dramatic monologue, elegy, epic, epiphany, epistolary, epithet, ethos, fiction,figurative language, form, genre, gothic, great chain of being, hero, hyperbole, imagery,

imagination, imitation, influence, intention, interior monologue, interpretation, invocation,irony, lyric, metaphor, meter, mock-epic, modernism, monologue, mood, motif,motivation, muse, myth, narrator, nature, negative capability, ode, paradox, parallelism,parody, pastoral, plot, point of view, post-modern, protagonist, rationalism, realism,representation, rhetoric, rhyme, satire, scansion, semiotics, sensibility, sentimentality,sonnet, stream of consciousness, structure, style, symbolism, taste, tension, text, theory,tradition, tragedy, trope, type, unity, universality.

Approaches: close reading, new criticism, historical criticism, humanism, marxism, feminism,gender studies, psychoanalytic criticism, queer theory, deconstruction, reception theory,reader response, post-colonial, cultural studies.

These lists are not intended to be exhaustive. Each instructor will have his or her won emphasis.Moreover, each of these terms and approaches will bring to mind a series of associated terms,variations, and innovations that should be discussed as part of the meaning of the term. Instructors might consider assigning a designated group of terms as required vocabulary andgiving quizzes on the definitions of those terms. Of course students will learn many such terms and approaches in the survey courses, but by thetime students have completed the surveys and this course, most of these terms and many othersshould be familiar to them.

Texts: There are a great variety of texts that can be used for this course. Many of these are available inLori's office for examination.

Handbooks:

Holman and Harmon, A Handbook to Literature. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.

Critical Approaches:

Barry, Beginning Theory. Richter, Falling into Theory. Lentricchia and McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study. Selden and Widdowson, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Eagleton, Literary Theory P. Schakel and J. Ridl. Approaching Poetry D. Lodge. The Art of Fiction

Many of these texts can also be used as background reading for instructors. See below for morebackground reading.

Writing texts: Students should be expected to have a grammar handbook, like the one they will use forFreshman Composition, for example (The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers). Orthe instructor could ask them to buy a more specialized literary style manual like Stevens andStewert's A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research.

Literary texts: A fair selection of Bedford-St. Martins editions of individual works are available. These specialeditions supply ample discussions of the works from a variety of critical perspectives: The Wife ofBath, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, The Heart of Darkness, Howards End, The ScarletLetter, Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hamlet, TheAwakening, and others. Any other works (poems, plays, essays), that the instructor thinks willwork well for class discussion are invited (see syllabus below). Instructors might also wish toemploy an anthology such as the Norton Introduction to Literature. There are also numerousvery inexpensive anthologies of poetry available from Dover Press, (e.g. Civil War Poetry,African American Poetry) and also selections from individual authors. These Athrift@ editions costas little as a dollar or two.

Background Reading for Instructors: For background, instructors might consult any of the theory introductions listed above or any ofthe following: Diane Sadoff and William Cain, Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (MLA,1994) is a very useful book. Rivkin and Ryan=s Literary Theory: An Anthology contains veryhelpful chapter introductions, clearly written and relatively jargon-free. Jonathan Culler=s LiteraryTheory: A Very Short Introduction is a good background text and has some useful bibliographiesand definitions at the end.

Assignments and Tests: Instructors should employ any of the following exercises, assignments, and tests.

SHORT EXERCISES: Instructors may train students to use the terms and concepts by asking them to perform a varietyof critical exercises such as the following or similar ones of their won invention. 8. Write a two-page analysis of the prosody of a Shakespeare

sonnet. The paper should show how the meter and prosodycontribute to the meaning of the poem.

9. Write a two-page analysis of the figurative language of

another poem.

10. Write a complete close-reading (language and prosody) of alyric poem or of a short passage from a piece of fiction(three pages).

11. Write a brief analysis comparing two critical approaches

(three pages). 12. Interpret a given literary work (poetry, prose, drama) using

a critical approach. Then interpret the same work using adifferent approach. Discuss the results.

13. Midterms and finals can be used to evaluate the students'

abilities to assimilate the information in the course. 14. Instructors might also employ peer editing as part of the

drafting process for some or all of the writing assignments. In addition to improving their writing, this will also helpstudents assimilate the skills necessary to writing goodliterary papers.

15. As mentioned above, instructors can use quizzes to help

students master the definitions of important terms. 16. Asking students to keep a reading journal will also help to

keep them focused on the reading and writing required ofthem in this course. Moreover, it can help stimulate classdiscussion.

Longer Research Paper:In addition to a variety of short exercises and tests like the ones above, instructors should askstudents to write one longer research paper (6-8 pages). In this paper students shoulddemonstrate their understanding of critical terms and approaches and an ability to use research tohelp produce their own critical reading of a work of literature. This assignment invitesconsideration of longer works since many of the above assignments focus on shorter works.

SYLLABUS

The syllabus for the course may vary greatly from instructor toinstructor, but one workable syllabus might look like this.Week one: Introduction and orientation

Week two: Close reading: selection of lyric poemsShakespeare, Donne, Arnold, Frost, Rich

Week three: Close reading: more poems, practicePope, Browning, Dickinson, Stevens

Week four: Critical and theoretical vocabulariesfeminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism

Week five: Critical and theoretical vocabulariesbiographical and historical backgroundChristian humanism and Marxist criticism

Week six: Critical and theoretical vocabulariesdeconstruction, gender studies

Week seven: Case studyHamlet by Shakespeare

Week eight: Case studyThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Doyle

Week nine: Case studyGoblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Week ten: Case StudyMidnight's Children by Rushdie

Week eleven: The long PaperResearch and documentation

Week twelve: The long paper

Week thirteen: Cultural criticism

Week fourteen: Case study

Dracula by Stoker

Week fifteen: Completing the long paper: trouble-shooting