ENG 120-01 - Literary Analysis

4 credits (Fall)

“Dots, Dashes, and (Other) Asides: Meaning Otherwise.” Welcome to English 120. In this course, works of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Conrad, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, and Herman Melville will be gleaned for the ethical and aesthetic lessons that semantic content and narrative form can offer. Engagement with aspects of formalism, reader response, psychoanalytic and cultural criticism will enable us to appreciate the ways in which a particular interpretive framework opens us to possibilities even as it forecloses others. In addition, we will focus very close attention on specific moments in each text when the writer uses ellipses, em dashes, or parentheticals to say something more, or less, than the occasion may require. In doing so, the writer reaches out to us. So, rather than leap over these moments to a foregone conclusion, we will, with Emily Dickinson, view them instead as invitations to “dwell in possibility.” There has been much handwringing recently as to whether our culture needs, or wants, literature. As Gwendolyn Brooks admonishes: “First fight. Then fiddle.” This course is dedicated to two interrelated propositions: that literature exists; and it needs us to fight and fiddle.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Andrews