ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day. Blevin Shelnutt.

Topic for 2025/26b: Reclaiming Aesthetics: Literary Art in the World. How do we define literary art, and how does literary studies matter to a world in crisis? This course explores how critical theory from Plato to the present helps us answer these questions. We’ll focus on the relationship between literary art and the “real” world. What are the material conditions that shape the making of literary art, and how does literary art shape the societies in which it circulates? What is the liberatory potential of literature and literary study, given their persistently disciplinary functions? During the first half of the semester, we’ll trace connections from classical meditations on literary creation (Plato, Aristotle) to early modern defenses of literature’s importance (Giovanni Boccaccio, Sir Philip Sidney), to debates about the putative autonomy of art versus literature’s worldly uses (Immanuel Kant, Oscar Wilde, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Pierre Bourdieu and more). In the second half of the semester, we’ll examine how more recent critics have interrogated the discipline of literary studies while demonstrating how we can use literature and the tools of literary criticism to rethink, and ultimately to transform, modern life (Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Terry Eagleton, bell hooks, among many others).

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS