ENGL7024 (Critical Reading) fulfills the research course requirement and is aimed especially at students who are interested in literary studies. It explores the philosophical foundations of the discipline of Literary (and by extension Cultural) Studies to understand the literary profession as well as the pursuit of advanced degrees in literatures in English as it develops your skills in identifying, gathering and evaluating sources, defining/refining a research topic, and persuasively presenting your research. In addition, this course will also be an introduction to the movements and figures representative of literary and cultural theory from the 20th-century to the present toward the goal of building a strong foundation and background in literary scholarship. This course will be both reflective (by encouraging you to think critically about literature and its intersections with philosophy, politics, ethics, psychology, and sociology, among others) and practical (by equipping you with a substantive critical vocabulary to productively participate in scholarly discourse within the broad field of literary and cultural studies). This course was designed to be both a historical introduction to the various schools of 20th-century criticism as well as an immersion in the theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism.
- Teacher: Peter Mathews, Mathews Peter David