ENG 120-01 & 02 - Literary Analysis

4 credits (Spring)

Global Modernism and its Legacies. What, exactly, is literature? What determines if it is good? How can we engage its richness with rigor and joy? Through our study of post-1900 prose, poetry, plays, radio programs, and film, this course will introduce you to techniques for literary analysis and master the tools needed to craft well-argued written critiques. In turn, we will work with supplemental materials such as book reviews, critical essays, interviews, newspapers, and digital sources to situate literary texts in their cultural, economic, and socio-historical context. Part of this exploration will involve a foray into the field of literary theory which examines how currents in political, social, and philosophical thought alter the way writers perceive their worlds and in turn affect the style of writing they use to represent it. We will consider work by E. M. Forster, Langston Hughes, Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Woolf, Sergei Eisenstein, Mulk Raj Anand, Una Marson, Wole Soyinka, Catherine Mansfield, Lu Xun, Bertolt Brecht, and Naguib Mahfouz.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Sutaria