Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A professional seminar that provides students with a grounding in pedagogy and introduces professional aspects of English studies. Course will be graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.

COURSE DETAILS:

This professional development seminar will be devoted to exploring analytical methodologies within early modern English literature, in their historical and current contexts. We will read a number of articles either representing or discussing diverse critical methodologies in early modern literary studies, and literary studies at large, some of which will be focused on Hamlet. Some of these articles may seem dated, as they emerge from earlier periods of time; this allows us a glimpse at the history of critical approaches and enables us to assess both their earlier and present significance. It is important to recognize that not only is there is no one objective history of literary criticism, but also that a six week examination of literary methodologies is necessarily incomplete. I have left out, for instance, an example of Deconstruction, because while the concepts deconstruction opened up to literary scholars are still a profoundly significant part of  21^st century epistemology, pure examples of deconstructive criticism of early modern literature are now rarely seen and examples from the past are so riddled with problematic excesses that they don’t seem worth including. Similarly, we do not have a week devoted to Marxist Criticism, not because its insights aren’t still relevant, but because many scholars, myself included, see them as subsumed within New Historicism and other materialist-historicist approaches. Similarly, while I considered looking at an example of Feminist Criticism, the diversity of approaches that fall within that rubric is enormous and feminist concerns are found within a broad range of critical approaches; dare I say, it’s become mainstream. Ultimately, we simply have only six classes, so we are limited in our scope.

This is a pass-fail course with no grades, but it involves a significant amount of reading, writing, and responsible class participation in order to pass.