Literary Theory

This course steps back from reading individual works to ask the harder question underneath literary study: what assumptions about meaning, value, and ideology are you bringing to a text before you even open it? You'll work through the major twentieth-century frameworks — psychoanalysis, Marxism and the Frankfurt School, Foucauldian discourse analysis, postcolonialism, feminist and queer theory, and more recent turns like posthumanism and affect — and then apply them to actual literary texts through quizzes, a paper proposal at the midterm, and a final term paper. It's the course that gives the rest of your ELIT seminars their critical vocabulary, so the lens you sharpen here is the one you'll be arguing with for the rest of your degree.