Description: The E314L and E314V courses have a special function in our curriculum. The English department requires all majors to take one of these two courses before graduation and strongly advises them to do so prior to enrolling in any upper-division English courses. E314L and V introduce students to our discipline and prepare them for success in our upper-division courses. All variants of E314L and E314V bring questions of method and approach to the foreground, even though the specific literary materials studied in individual variants differs.
Instructors of E314V face an additional challenge. Because E314V introduces students to specific ethnic and minority literary and cultural traditions, these courses also serve some non-English majors who have an interest in that particular ethnic or minority culture. E314V courses should be and usually are closely tied to the various centers on campus, who help to publicize them and to enroll students. Indeed where possible these course are cross-listed with the relevant centers (which means that a certain number of seats are reserved for students who enroll through the centers). If a center on campus corresponds with the topic of your course, you should make sure to inform that center about your class. Of course, we think that even non-English majors in these courses benefit from a substantive introduction to our discipline! For that matter, these courses have a track record of converting students to the English major.

Critical Skills: Whatever other critical skills or scholarly methods they learn, by the end of the term your students should know what it means to close read a stretch of literary language and should have practice in doing so. They should also know how to access and use the Oxford English Dictionary and should understand why it is important for literary analysis.

Critical Approaches: Students should leave your course with a practical understanding that there are different sorts of questions one can bring to a given work and that putting different questions to a literary work will lead to different sorts of answers. Specifically, all 314V courses should introduce students to--and give them practice in--three rubrics of analysis that we heuristically designate by the shorthand of formal, historical, and cultural. Formal approaches require students to think carefully about matters of genre, structure, and language--not only what is said but how it is said. Historical approaches ask students to think about literary works in relation to other historical events, developments, and discourses, whether literary or non-literary. Under this rubric, one might also help students consider the material forms and processes by which specific literary works were produced, published, circulated, and read. "Cultural" here refers to approaches that investigate a work's inflections by and interventions in such historically contested categories as gender, race, class, religion, and sexuality.
We all know, of course, that these divisions and labels are somewhat arbitrary. In our own critical practices, many of us believe that formal, historical, and cultural questions about literature are not finally (or perhaps even initially) separable; indeed, they often quickly lead to one another. Nonetheless, these three rubrics can and should serve a heuristic purpose as you introduce beginning English majors to the different methods and approaches they will encounter in their upper-division classes.

Writing: All sections of E314 are taught with a substantial writing component. Although writing can and should be incorporated into various facets of your course, your most important writing instruction goal is to help students learn how to develop relatively short critical essays (2-6 pages) with a well-focused thesis argument based primarily in their own close engagement with a primary text or texts. In most cases, you should not assign lengthy research-based term papers or projects.