Preliminary Web Course Description
*Please note: This is a preliminary web course description only. The department reserves the right to change without notice any information in this description. The final, binding course outline will be distributed in the first class of the semester.

School of English and Theatre Studies

Course Code:
ENGL 2120-02
 	 Course Title:
 Critical Practices	Date of Offering:

Winter 2107	
Course Instructor: 
G.Campbell	School of English and Theatre Studies	
Brief Course Synopsis: 
This course guides students through a range of critical approaches and explores their implications for specific readings of a limited number of literary texts. The seminar’s main areas of concentration are (1) close reading, centering on the way a particular poem, work of fiction, play, or film works in its details and overall structure; (2) critical approaches and methodologies; and (3) critical writing and discussion.
Students will generate their own seminar topics in an ongoing dialogue between literary texts and specific schools of literary theory. We will have the freedom of returning to texts with new sets of questions; we will explore how literary theory illuminates literary texts and equally how literary texts contribute to ongoing cultural/political debates in such areas as feminism and gender study, psychology and psychoanalysis, and the future of humanities within the University in modern postindustrial, postmodern societies.
	
Course Format:	lecture/discussion/seminar	
	Methods of Evaluation and Weights:    Seminar Presentation    15%    	Hamlet Assignment 	10%	                                 
Short Paper (750-1000 word) 10%
Participation:		10%
Final Paper (2000-2500 words) 30%
Final Exam Take Home		25%
                                       	
Texts and/or Resources Required (e.g. Internet access, specific textbook title, lab kit, etc.)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Fourth Edition. (Norton)
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. (Penguin)
Rice, Philip and Partricia Waugh. Eds. Modern Literary Theory. (Hodder Arnold) (MLT)
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. Ed Robert S. Miola. (Norton)
(We call it the “Jude Law Edition” because of its cover.)
Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Ed Philip Rieff. (Touchstone)
You will watch two movies on DVD outside of class time: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
	
Other information that you wish share about the course (optional):