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English 150L: Introduction to Literary Analysis (WRPR)
Intended like other sections of the Writing Program to advance students' critical reading and analytical writing skills, English 150 is geared specifically towards introducing students to the discipline that studies the literary traditions of the English language. One aim of this course is to explore the broad range of thematic interests inherent in these traditions, sharing as they do common roots in the history of our language and its influences. The powers and limits of language; ideas of "character" and "community," and the relation between person and place; heroic endeavor and the mystery of evil; loss and renovation-- these are among the themes to be tracked through various strategies of literary representation and interpretation in a variety of genres (epic, narrative, and poetry) and modes (realism, allegory, and romance), and across a range of historical periods. Our goal is to develop the vocabulary, skills, and knowledge necessary to understand not only how we decide what literary texts "mean," but also how literary texts generate and contemplate "meaning."
Reading lists for each section vary, but typically include works by Homer (or another epic writer of similar importance to the English language tradition), Shakespeare, nineteenth-century British or American poets and novelists, and modern writers who recall, revise, and supplement concerns developed by their predecessors.
This course carries with it credit towards the English major and satisfies the Freshman Writing Requirement. Students who elect English 150, whether or not they choose to major in English, will find themselves well prepared for further work in this department. Students who take a different writing seminar in order to satisfy the College writing requirement will find that there are other means to enter the English major should they decide to do so. Students choosing English 150 will be placed in one of several sections being offered in either term.
For 2006-07 the seminars offered are:
WRPR 150a-01 Introduction to Literary Analysis: The Journey of (Self-)Discovery
S. Hock
This seminar will center on close reading and vigorous discussion of selected works from the Western canon that establish parallels between the journeys that their protagonists undertake and those protagonists’ discovery through their journeys of their own selves. Readings will include Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, as well as selected shorter texts. Writing requirements will include three formal essays with revisions, a final essay, and various shorter assignments.150a-02 Introduction to Literary Analysis: “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”
C. Zwarg
The hallucination we call reality has captured the imagination of many authors, and this course explores that haunting register across a variety of literary forms. Beginning with a translation of Homer’s Odyssey, we will consider how theories of translation can inform our understanding of the realities with which writers contend. If we all live in language, what genres of living might emerge? How does a writer like Shakespeare help us to experience those props, especially when we need a dictionary and lots of footnotes to understand them? (Can a dictionary be read like a poem?) What is the reality at work in the novels of Jane Austen and why do people love losing themselves there? (What does it mean to lose yourself in reading?) Can the supreme fictions of Wallace Stevens help us out? Is an Emerson essay really a crazy salad? What ghosts from Homer and Shakespeare return when Derek Walcott stages the Odyssey through the haunting registers of Caribbean history? Emphasis on rereading and writing as pleasure zones for discoveries of thought.
WRPR 150a-03 In the Wake of War: Literary Representations of Violence and its Aftermath
T. Tensuan
The narrator of Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" declares that "[y]ou can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end." This course focuses on literary texts' representions, reconsiderations, and recontextualizations of cultural conflict. Examining texts ranging from Homer's Odyssey, Mary Chesnut's Civil War diaries, and Art Spiegleman's Maus, we will focus on the following questions: how does war transform individual and national identities? How do genres like the epic poem or the comic book make manifest cultural values? What role does literature play in processes of memorialization and of protest? Writing assignments will range from informal group journals, to analytic and creative essays, to graphic novellas.WRPR 150b-04 Encountering the Unknown: An Introduction to Literary Analysis
G. Stadler
This is a course in the critical reading of literary narrative. Reading texts from Homer’s Odyssey to a contemporary novel, we will concentrate on the structural mechanics of narratives as they encounter different sorts of chaos, turmoil, indecipherability, and strangeness—both psychological and social, individual and cultural. While developing an effective toolbox of critical concepts, we will persistently discuss questions concerning literary language’s resources as a social force and in transmitting history.WRPR 150b-05 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Gender, Sexuality & The Body
D. Sherman
The body is often considered the “bad fetish”; that is, in a Western tradition that privileges mind, the body is to be abjured, punished, disciplined. Yet the body is the seat of desire, certainly, and “embodiment” an idea (a “corpus” of literary texts; prose that “embodies” intents and desires) so often touched upon in literature that we might suspect an anxious and reflexive acknowledgment of its centrality to literary and other experience. In this course, we will trace out the effects of these ambiguous and ambivalent categories—or what we mean by the very terms “body”, “gender” and “sexuality”—in such works as The Odyssey, Spencer’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Othello, the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle”. Essays will focus on close reading and critical analysis, and be revised in tutorials which meet throughout the semester.
150b-06 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Wild Analysis
D. Stuber
The premise of this seminar is that there is something intransigent and inexplicable—something wild—about any given literary text. We might call this wildness the singularity of the literary work. But even as this singularity resists analysis it also demands a response. The literary text thus always simultaneously makes and exceeds meaning. Our task will be to negotiate this apparent contradiction. How can we explain a work of literature without explaining it away? What makes a text strange? How do we best express our response to that strangeness? How should we write about writing? We will approach these questions through our responses to texts that, by virtue of their excessive qualities, emphasize the contradictory project of literary analysis. These excesses inhere equally in the form and the content of our chosen texts, which otherwise range widely in genre and place of origin. Readings include the obduracy of Sophocles’s Antigone and Todd Haynes’s Safe, as well as the exuberance of Lawrence’s The Fox and Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. Our work will emphasize close reading and (re)writing.
See also the listing of the complete First-Year Writing Seminars and a description of the Writing Program at Haverford College
300-level courses