Examination of modern critical approaches to literature, including close reading and critical analysis of selected prose fiction, drama, and poetry. Texts are examined through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives that represent modern critical inquiry into literature. This course includes continued training and practice in clear and effective critical writing, and a research paper. Designed for all English majors and interested students.

English Elective

Introduction to Literary Studies is an inquiry into what it means to study literature, involving close reading, critical and creative analysis of a wide variety of prose fiction, drama, and poetry, and informed by an introduction to some of theoretical issues currently invigorating literary studies. In addition to works of literature, students will read critical and theoretical works. This course combines a study of literature with continued training in clear and effective expression. It is designed for prospective Writing and Literature majors and other interested students.

3 hours; 3 creditsThis course introduces the academic discipline of literary study, involving a threefold emphasis: (1) on the close reading of texts, attending to their sounds and structures, modes and genres; (2) on recognizing literature as a conversation between texts across space and time; and (3) on the history of literary critical methods, terms, and concepts. *English courses numbered lower than 2115 may not be counted toward the English major. Satisfies Pathways Flexible CoreWorld Cultures and Global Issues requirement.Prerequisite: English 1012, or by permission of the chair of the Department.

Elective Cred Non Liberal Arts

A practical introduction to significant works of English, American, and Anglophoneliterature from the late Middle Ages to the present, with specialattention to literary terms, concerns, and forms, and an emphasis on closereading and on the relation of text and context.

Not open to students who have completed ENH 218.An introduction to the study of literature and specifically to the ways that people think, talk, and write about literature. It addresses the basic questions of literary study and its vocabulary: What is literature? What are the main kinds of literature? What are the main approaches to the study of literature? The course includes reading and writing about a selection of major works that represent a variety of periods and movements. It offers the rudiments of the knowledge necessary for further study in the field. This course is required for all English majors.

CBA Credit CC - Non Liberal Arts

Elective Credit

English Elective

Study of selected authors, works, genres, or time periods emphasizing various modes of critical and theoretical analysis, methods of research, and historical contextualization.

Introduction to Literary Study teaches the skills needed to study literature with understanding and pleasure. Students will learn strategies for reading, interpreting, criticizing, and writing about complex literary works. Through studying short stories, poetry, plays, and a novel, students ascertain the defining characteristics of literary genres, develop a working vocabulary of literary terms, and advance their ability to write critical essays on literary texts.

This course teaches students methods for analyzing, interpreting and writing about literature, including schools of thought such as psychoanalytic, new historicist, and race, class and gender perspectives. Students demonstrate proficiency in interpretation and critique, employing terms, tools and concepts of the literary critic, and identifying assumptions informing analyses of poetry, drama, fiction, film, etc. The course looks at critical history, reviews foundations from the 19th and 20th Centuries, and surveys the critical approaches important today. Students enrich their skills as scholastic writers by applying learned methodologies to close readings of literary texts.

Students read, discuss, and write analytic essays about significant concepts and texts in literary critical theory. They also learn to engage with critical approaches, which stem from multiple disciplines, and relate them to literary texts. Concepts covered may derive from such theorists as Aristotle, Longinus, Kant, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Gloria Anzaldua, and Judith Butler.CUNY Pathways: Flexible Core-Creative Expression

200-LEVEL ELECTIVE

English Elective

This course explores a specific idea or theme in English-language literature. Discussion, analysis of texts, or creative responses related to the course topic. Topics change each semester and have included humor, vampires and zombies, transnationalism and homesickness, utopias and dystopias, culture and identity, and graphic novels.

English Elective Credit

Elective Credit

Elective Credit

Elective Credit

Students will read closely and critically, applying a variety of critical approaches to literary works to explore how their meanings shift from these different perspectives.