English 2140

Introduction to Literary Studies

The following guidelines and syllabus are intended as a general guide for teachers of this course.
The guidelines (1-4) are intended to provide teachers with a sense of what outcomes the
department desires for these courses and to suggest some means of reaching those outcomes.
The syllabus (5) is one that I (Paul Schmidt) might use to teach this course. Every instructor will
have his or her own emphases and ideas of how best to train new English majors.
English 2140 is intended to prepare students to be astute readers of literature, aware of the
multiplicity of critical stances that inform the reading process. Students should leave the course
with a keen sense of what constitutes evidence in critical argument and with some notion of the
various vocabularies that have evolved in relation to particular schools of criticism.
The course should have the following features:
1. It will be required of all majors, whether they are
transfers or not.

2. It will be an absolute prerequisite for all other English
major courses (3000-4000) taken by majors.

3. Students from other disciplines do not need this
prerequisite except at the discretion of the professor for
the major course.

4. There will be a heavy emphasis on writing about literature
throughout the course. Students will learn MLA
parenthetical documentation style.

5. The course will require a handbook to introduce students to
literary vocabulary they will need as majors.

6. It will introduce students to a variety of critical
approaches to literature.

7. As often as possible, this class will be taught by full-
time, tenure-track faculty.

Terms and Approaches: The following is a sample of the kinds of terms and approaches
that may be emphasized in the course.

Terms: aesthetics, allegory, allusion, ambiguity, anti-hero, archetype, authorship, autotelic,
avant-garde, ballad, biographical fallacy, Calvinism, canon, carpe diem, character,
classicism, climax, couplet, comedy, conceit, convention, diction, didacticism, digression,
drama, dramatic monologue, elegy, epic, epiphany, epistolary, epithet, ethos, fiction,
figurative language, form, genre, gothic, great chain of being, hero, hyperbole, imagery,
imagination, imitation, influence, intention, interior monologue, interpretation, invocation,
irony, lyric, metaphor, meter, mock-epic, modernism, monologue, mood, motif,
motivation, muse, myth, narrator, nature, negative capability, ode, paradox, parallelism,
parody, pastoral, plot, point of view, post-modern, protagonist, rationalism, realism,
representation, rhetoric, rhyme, satire, scansion, semiotics, sensibility, sentimentality,
sonnet, stream of consciousness, structure, style, symbolism, taste, tension, text, theory,
tradition, tragedy, trope, type, unity, universality.

Approaches: close reading, new criticism, historical criticism, humanism, marxism, feminism,
gender studies, psychoanalytic criticism, queer theory, deconstruction, reception theory,
reader response, post-colonial, cultural studies.

These lists are not intended to be exhaustive. Each instructor will have his or her won emphasis.
Moreover, each of these terms and approaches will bring to mind a series of associated terms,
variations, and innovations that should be discussed as part of the meaning of the term.
Instructors might consider assigning a designated group of terms as required vocabulary and
giving quizzes on the definitions of those terms.

Of course students will learn many such terms and approaches in the survey courses, but by the
time students have completed the surveys and this course, most of these terms and many others
should be familiar to them.

Texts:

There are a great variety of texts that can be used for this course. Many of these are available in
Lori's office for examination.

Handbooks:

Holman and Harmon, A Handbook to Literature.
Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.

Critical Approaches:

Barry, Beginning Theory.
Richter, Falling into Theory.
Lentricchia and McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Selden and Widdowson, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory.
Eagleton, Literary Theory
P. Schakel and J. Ridl. Approaching Poetry
D. Lodge. The Art of Fiction

Many of these texts can also be used as background reading for instructors. See below for more
background reading.

Writing texts:
Students should be expected to have a grammar handbook, like the one they will use for
Freshman Composition, for example (The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers). Or
the instructor could ask them to buy a more specialized literary style manual like Stevens and
Stewert's A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research.

Literary texts:

A fair selection of Bedford-St. Martins editions of individual works are available. These special
editions supply ample discussions of the works from a variety of critical perspectives: The Wife of
Bath, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, The Heart of Darkness, Howards End, The Scarlet
Letter, Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hamlet, The
Awakening, and others. Any other works (poems, plays, essays), that the instructor thinks will
work well for class discussion are invited (see syllabus below). Instructors might also wish to
employ an anthology such as the Norton Introduction to Literature. There are also numerous
very inexpensive anthologies of poetry available from Dover Press, (e.g. Civil War Poetry,
African American Poetry) and also selections from individual authors. These Athrift@editions cost
as little as a dollar or two.

Background Reading for Instructors:

For background, instructors might consult any of the theory introductions listed above or any of
the following:

Diane Sadoff and William Cain, Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (MLA,
1994) is a very useful book. Rivkin and Ryan=s Literary Theory: An Anthology contains very
helpful chapter introductions, clearly written and relatively jargon-free. Jonathan Culler=s Literary
Theory: A Very Short Introduction is a good background text and has some useful bibliographies
and definitions at the end.

Assignments and Tests:

Instructors should employ any of the following exercises, assignments, and tests.

SHORT EXERCISES:
Instructors may train students to use the terms and concepts by asking them to perform a variety
of critical exercises such as the following or similar ones of their won invention.

8. Write a two-page analysis of the prosody of a Shakespeare
sonnet. The paper should show how the meter and prosody
contribute to the meaning of the poem.

9. Write a two-page analysis of the figurative language of
another poem.

10. Write a complete close-reading (language and prosody) of a
lyric poem or of a short passage from a piece of fiction
(three pages).

11. Write a brief analysis comparing two critical approaches
(three pages).

12. Interpret a given literary work (poetry, prose, drama) using
a critical approach. Then interpret the same work using a
different approach. Discuss the results.

13. Midterms and finals can be used to evaluate the students'
abilities to assimilate the information in the course.

14. Instructors might also employ peer editing as part of the
drafting process for some or all of the writing assignments.
In addition to improving their writing, this will also help
students assimilate the skills necessary to writing good
literary papers.

15. As mentioned above, instructors can use quizzes to help
students master the definitions of important terms.

16. Asking students to keep a reading journal will also help to
keep them focused on the reading and writing required of
them in this course. Moreover, it can help stimulate class
discussion.
Longer Research Paper:
In addition to a variety of short exercises and tests like the ones above, instructors should ask
students to write one longer research paper (6-8 pages). In this paper students should
demonstrate their understanding of critical terms and approaches and an ability to use research to
help produce their own critical reading of a work of literature. This assignment invites
consideration of longer works since many of the above assignments focus on shorter works.
SYLLABUS
The syllabus for the course may vary greatly from instructor to
instructor, but one workable syllabus might look like this.
Week one: Introduction and orientation
Week two: Close reading: selection of lyric poems
Shakespeare, Donne, Arnold, Frost, Rich
Week three: Close reading: more poems, practice
Pope, Browning, Dickinson, Stevens
Week four: Critical and theoretical vocabularies
feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism
Week five: Critical and theoretical vocabularies
biographical and historical background
Christian humanism and Marxist criticism
Week six: Critical and theoretical vocabularies
deconstruction, gender studies
Week seven: Case study
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Week eight: Case study
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Doyle
Week nine: Case study
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Week ten: Case Study
Midnight's Children by Rushdie
Week eleven: The long Paper
Research and documentation
Week twelve: The long paper
Week thirteen: Cultural criticism
Week fourteen: Case study
Dracula by Stoker
Week fifteen: Completing the long paper: trouble-shooting