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ENGL 202 A: Introduction to the Study of English Language and Literature

Meeting Time: 
MWF 10:30am - 11:20am
Location: 
OTB 014
SLN: 
13826
Instructor:
LaPorte photo
Charles LaPorte

Syllabus Description:

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.

 

 

Catalog Description: 
Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English. Cannot be taken for credit if student has taken ENGL 301.
GE Requirements: 
Arts and Humanities (A&H)
Credits: 
5.0
Status: 
Active
Last updated: 
October 20, 2020 - 10:20pm
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