Official Course Description: “Two central questions—what is literature? and how do people critique it?—frame this course, guiding our study of some basic theories of the relationships peculiar to a literary work, its author, its audience members, and the worlds in which these entities meet. Reading and writing assignments are designed to meet two interrelated goals: to explore literary ways of knowing by practicing different methods of literary analysis (including romanticism, formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism), and to situate these theoretical developments amid major social developments of the past two centuries (including marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial struggles).”