Literary Theory

Catalog description

This course is a historical survey of literary theory, beginning with its origins in the writings of Plato and Aristotle on poetics and rhetoric. The development of theory is traced chronologically through Renaissance hermeneutics and humanism, Romanticism, and the 19th-century discipline of philology. The course concludes with a consideration of the 20th-century critical discourses of formalism, structuralism and deconstruction, as well as contemporary critical trends. (This course is cross-listed as CMP 4011. Students may receive credit for either ENG 4011 or CMP 4011, not both. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F grade replacement policy.)