ENGL 345: Critical Theory.

This course is a survey of the major methods of literary criticism of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, beginning with Formalism and most likely including (but not restricted to) psychoanalytical criticism, Marxist criticism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, feminist and gender criticism, new historicism, and postcolonial criticism. It focuses on how these methodologies can be used to open up literary works in new and creative ways, but rather than encouraging students to pick one or another approach, it enables them to arrive at their own way of approaching literature.