BA English Literature and Spanish

This course aims to introduce students to key concepts and techniques in the critical reading of literature.  It examines works in four major categories: prose, poetry, drama, and popular culture.  Within each category, lecturers identify and demonstrate some of the methods involved in the practice of close reading or rhetorical analysis.   Lectures model the kinds of “reading” that students are expected to use in writing essays, including:  

 - reading with an awareness of genre  

 - reading in relation to a text’s authorship, reception, or cultural contexts  

 - reading with an attention to formal features like point of view, word choice, sentence-length, verse form, poetic devices, and poetic rhythm and meter  

 - reading for the relationship between a work’s content and its form.  

' To introduce students to reading skills in the main genres in contemporary English studies.

- To familiarize students with a range of important terms and tools (including the ability to scan lines of verse) in the critical reading of prose, poetry, drama, and culture.

- To develop students' ability to use critical reading in order to construct an argument.

- To introduce students to the theoretical issues around the notion of culture, and to the reading skills needed when critically evaluating popular culture.

- To develop skills of written and oral expression.

- To develop students' ability to work effectively as a group and in online discussion groups.

- To develop students' IT skills through Blackboard.

2 hours of lecture and 1 hour of seminar  

Lecture slides, handouts, and other teaching materials will be posted on blackboard after the relevant lecture.  

• Identify works in a variety of different forms 

• Identify and explicate some of the methods used by literary or cultural critics to examine formal issues and to link a work’s form with its content 

• Formulate arguments on the basis of textual evidence 

• Use appropriate scholarly terms and methods of presentation 

• · Give critical readings of texts in different genres, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and drama

• Communicate appropriately in online and seminar discussions 

• Express their arguments in writing that reaches a Level 1 standard 

• Read texts critically and with attention to rhetorical detail 

• Speak and debate issues clearly 

• Navigate and utilize the resources available on Blackboard 

The first three weeks of lectures and seminars will focus on some poems, which will be available via a course handbook. For further weeks you should borrow from the library or buy copies of:
- Jane Austen, Emma, ed. John Mullan (Oxford, 2022)
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds Lauren Working, Rory Loughnane, and Emma Smith (Oxford, 2024)
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame (Faber, 2009)

Each week you will also be expected to read one piece of secondary criticism, an article or a chapter, which will be available on Blackboard. These critical and theoretical sources will help deepen your thinking as you develop your approach in response to the weekly themes and the overall arc of the course, so I encourage you to spend time on essential and additional reading before class. An extensive further reading list, designed to support your assessments, is available via Reading Lists Online (accessible through Blackboard).

In addition, some of this course’s seminar exercises and support for assessment will use Gerald Graff’s and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (sixth edn., 2024), available through the library’s core books. You can draw on this book’s practical advice for reading, research, and writing at university.