Eng 564

TIFFIN UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES

Minimum Course Content Guide

Course Number:  ENG564                         

Course Name: Literary Theory

Prerequisite: HUM510, ART623

Course Description: This course surveys selected texts and figures important to the history of textual interpretation from the classical era to the twentieth century, including works by Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Dryden, Wordsworth, Arnold, Nietzsche, and others, and contemporary approaches such as Marxist, psychological, structuralist, post-structuralist and postmodernist, feminist, postcolonial, gender studies, and cultural studies.  Contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and others will be studied and their central concepts applied to literary texts.  Students will learn to consider multiple interpretations of a text and learn to examine the assumptions underlying a variety of interpretive strategies.  Students will also explore the interrelation­ships between writer, reader, and text.  Offered every semester. (3 hour)

Evaluations: Assignments will include

·      Discussion board posts

·      Summary or outlines of major works

·      Application essays

·      Live chats

These assignments will stress the following tasks

·      Knowledge of specific types of textual interpretation and their origins.

·      Ability to summarize briefly the major ideas of a variety of approaches to textual interpretation.

·      Ability to apply the major ideas of a variety of approaches to textual interpretation to literary or other creative texts.

Minimum Topic Outline: The purpose of this course is to introduce students to major works in literary theory.  At minimum, students will review

·      Some readings in pre twentieth-century approaches to literature which may include selected dialogs by Plato, selections from Aristotle’s Poetics, Plotinus, Longinus, selections from Dante or Aquinas, Sydney’s Defense of Poetry, Kant’s or Hegel’s works on aesthetics, Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and/or others.

·      Marxist approaches to literature

·      Psychological approaches to literature

·      Twentieth-century Formalist or New Critical approaches

·      Structuralist approaches to literature

·      Feminist approaches to literature

·      Poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches to literature

·      Postcolonial approaches to literature

Potential Textbooks:

Literary or other creative works as test cases for analysis chosen at the instructor’s discretion.

Adams, Hazard, and John Searle, eds.  Critical Theory Since Plato.

Bressler, Charles. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice, 4^th ed. Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Docherty, Thomas, ed.  Postmodernism.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds.  Literary Theory: An Anthology.

Lead Instructor: James Rovira

Carnegie Units:

Weekly discussion boards: 45 hours

Writing assignments: 40 hours

Reading assignments: 45 hours

Research in secondary sources: 10 hours

Live chats: 4 hours

Total: 144 hours

Created May 2012

Updated Sept. 2012