Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

By this point in your college career, you have probably figured out what your professors “want” in terms of the papers that you write for literature classes. You know that they like quotations from your primary texts, they like MLA format, they like clever paper titles, and they love it when you use 10 point Times Roman. But how much time have you spent really thinking about how you read, and why you make the choices that you do when you write about a poem, a play, or a work of fiction? How much time have you spent going “behind the scenes” of literary composition, in order to understand what informs a text and how you decide to approach it? For example, did your high school teachers instruct you not to use “I” in a paper? Why?

In this course, we will be reading a relatively limited number of primary texts, but we will accompany each of them with a wide range of secondary source readings about the changing, and sometimes conflicting, ways that academic writers interpret literature. And in your own writing, you’ll focus on moving beyond the conventional or the mindless and into engaged critical reflections on the works. By the time the course is over, with any luck, you’ll have moved beyond the idea that academic literary papers have to be approached in the formulaic way that Goldberg describes.

Student Outcomes

Students will be able to: 1) engage in meaningful discussion of primary literary texts. 2) recognize and critique varying approaches to literary scholarship. 3) write thoughtful literary essays in response to a range of works.

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