ENGL 301 A: Introduction To The Study Of English Language And Literature

English 301: Introduction to the study of English Language and Literature

Why study English? Why study literature? Are literary power or poetic
beauty truly accessible to analysis? Does impassioned rhetoric move us
because of its passion or because of its rhetoric? And whatever can it
mean that various books or poems or writers are so often called great?
Great for what, exactly?

This course is a "gateway" introduction to the English major. You need
to take it if you are to be an English major (though you may also take
it without any such intentions). It is designed to introduce students to
the historical, cultural, and critical contexts of literature and
literary study. Among other things, it will entail the reading and
discussion of poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. And it will
introduce students to the kinds of debates that surrounded the creation
of the first English departments in the nineteenth century, when the
serious academic study of anglophone literature began. It cannot
introduce you to every aspect of the English major (e.g., we will
probably do no creative writing), but it will leave you with a broad
sense of the field, with some grasp of major critical vantages like
historicism and feminist theory, and with real training in the
bread-and-butter parts of the discipline: genre analysis and explication
de texte, or close reading. In it, I promise at least a little
impassioned rhetoric and a lot of great reading.

The course requires concurrent enrollment in English 297.