Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- OT-ANG17-310/v
- Title
- Modern English and American Literature and Culture: Literature and theory in the 20th century
- Usual semester
- Spring
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- Learning outcomes
- The aim of this course is to add further, more advanced readings to the more fundamental and/or introductory texts of criticism and theory. Sampling various branches of modern and postmodern theory, this course attempts to apply critical toolkits to pieces of primary literature, while also acknowledging the blur of the boundaries between literature proper and theory. We hope thus to expand students’ competences with regard to inventively approaching literary texts – poetry, drama, and prose – and making the most of their reading, whether for pleasure or for profession.
- Course content
- We will read selected 20th-century and, potentially, 21st-century theoretical and critical works and apply them to one or several literary works each.
- Assessment method
- Weekly instalments of reading and preparation; in-class presentation; end-term test; home paper.
- Bibliography
- Primary literature: Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. E. E. Cummings, selected poetry. Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Secondary literature: Adams, Hazard & Leroy Searle (ed.). Critical Theory since 1965. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986. Lodge, David (ed.). 20th-Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. London: Longman, 1972. —. Modern Theory and Criticism: A Reader. London: Longman, 1988. Makaryk, Irena R. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. U of Toronto P, 1993.