Department of English

This course will introduce graduate students to the major theoretical concepts that have shaped literary studies over the last three decades. We will read key texts of Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical and continental theory, and a set of conceptual turns in cultural studies. We will consider the ways in which these interpretive frames have come to define our objects of study, as well as their relevance to scholarship today. In analyzing these shifting models, this course seeks to address the challenges of advanced literary study in a changing theoretical landscape.