Intro to Lit: Ways of Reading

Catalog description

This course introduces students to Literary Studies, a field of diverse intellectual approaches focused on the meaning-making practices people engage in to make sense of their world. Central to the work of Literary Studies is recognizing the broad nature of "texts," including literature, language, and other cultural productions and artifacts, and the various methods of literary, linguistic, and rhetorical studies employed in their analysis and interpretation. We will survey literary forms such as poetry and drama, and prose narratives such as novels and short stories, to ask questions that arise when we make literature an object of study. What is literature and what was it? How does an individual work relate to others in its genre or tradition or to other media formats? Does an author's intention matter to the meaning of a work of art? How might the circumstances of literary production (an author's biography, publication venue, historical context) inflect our understanding of its meaning(s)? How can concepts from other disciplines (psychology, economics, philosophy, gender studies) alter our approach to reading and writing? Throughout the course, we will read literature that strives for different types of effects and reflects diverse world views. The ways of reading learned in the course are powerful tools for critically assessing discourses that expand far beyond the realm of literature.