LITERARY CRITICISM, ENGLISH 603

COURSE QUESTIONS

Dr. Rachela Permenter Spring 1994, Slippery Rock University

• Focus for the semester's readings and class discussions.
• Help in understanding your own relationship to literature and in formulating your own critical and pedagogical approaches.
• Essay questions for take-home examinations.
• Topics for groups (discussion leaders) from Part III.

Most questions in Parts I and II can be put into Richter's categories:

(A) WHY DO WE READ?
(B) WHAT DO WE READ?
(C) HOW DO WE READ?

Part I

Why are you choosing to build your life's work around literature/writing? (Hint: Having some talent in the area is not enough.) Why study and teach literature? Why should you (are you required to) take a course in literary criticism?

Part II

1. What is literature?
2. What is the purpose of literature?
3. What is the value of literature?
4. What is "good" literature?
5. What should be read in high school and college literature courses?
6. What is literary criticism?
7. What is the function of literary criticism?
8. What is literary theory?
9. What does theory have to do with literature and criticism?
10. How is meaning created?
11. Where or what is the meaning of a text?
12. Is meaning created by the author or reader or does it reside in the text?
13. To what degree is the meaning of a text fixed?
14. Who or what is the author of a text?
15. Where or what is a text?
16. How do the frameworks of language and culture determine how we read (and how we construct reality, construct our identities, and produce meaning)?
17. Does literature imitate life or does life imitate literature?
18. Which is more important: form or content? Is form separable from content?
19. Can art interpret the world?
20. Does the world have a meaning?
21. (How) Does literature determine cultural assumptions and personal identity?
22. What do truth, beauty, and purity have to do with literature and criticism?

Part III

1. The Critical Tradition (use excerpts and full selections from Crit Trad: Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sydney, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Shelley, & Emerson)
2. New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics
3. Reader-Response and Reader-Reception Criticism
4. Deconstruction
5. Feminist Criticism
6. New Historicism
7. Marxist Criticism
8. Discourse/Power and Postcolonial Criticism
9. Psychological Criticism

Part IV

What is:
1. Postmodernism (as compared to modernism?)
2. Poststructuralism (as compared to structuralism?)

Part V

Last updated on November 26

English Department Home Page