Sophomore Tutorial: Literary Methods
ENGLISH 97 001
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
This course, taught in small groups and required for concentrators, introduces theories, interpretive frameworks, and central questions about literature and literary media. What do we do when we read? What is an author? What do we mean by “literature” itself? How might we compare and evaluate interpretations? How do the historical, social, cultural, and legal frameworks around a text shape its meanings and its effects? Combining major critical and theoretical writings with primary works, the course investigates how literary production and interpretation are informed by philosophical and aesthetic traditions, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, national and post-colonial identities, and the material forms in which literature circulates, from parchment books to the internet. Students will also practice fundamental literary research methods through close engagement with Harvard libraries.
Class Notes
This course will engage with the study of literary forms and critical theory at a time when textual interpretation and literary judgment are imperiled by AI-assisted speed reading, and empirical reason is challenged by the proliferation of “alternative facts”. The uses and abuses of AI will accompany our inquiry into more traditional questions of literary methods: What is Literature? Who is the “author”? How do genres—novel, poetry, film, media, long-form journalism, film, television, documentary—enhance our understanding of the norms and forms of literary analysis? How do theoretical perspectives—queer studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, African American studies, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, human rights, environmental ethics—transform the traditional aims and methods of our discipline? We will approach literary methods not merely as a study of textual techniques or analytical efficiency, but as a deep humanist conversation with Lived Experience.
Theoretical differences and critical controversies will be studied by way of significant works of the literary and visual imagination. They will demonstrate how methods and mores are closely connected in the study of form and meaning. The value that literature brings to the public domain is contained in an essential commitment to capaciously and judiciously represent the world as we know it—warts and all—while thinking and feeling beyond its limits, to envisage the world as we would wish it to be. That is the common pursuit of the critics, writers and visual artists we will be working on this term.
Close-reading and analytic precision are essential pedagogical prerequisites to the questions I have proposed above. Teaching “methods” is not a dry, formulaic art; methods are active systems of thinking, reading and writing, that have to be brought to life through seminar participation. This is why I encourage open and intense discussions amongst my students, whom I invite to speak for themselves while listening intently and fairly to others. Our purpose in this course is to build arguments together, not to create a culture of “winning” arguments in the market-place of ideas opinions.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
