DESCRIPTION OF E314 AND ITS ROLE WITHIN THE ENGLISH MAJOR: E314's status within the English major at UT has just undergone a shift. Starting with students who enter the university in Fall 2009, all English majors will be required to take either E314L or E314V.* Because there is only one other absolutely required course for English majors (the senior seminar), the department as a whole will be devoting new attention to E314. It is very important that these courses actually do what we (the sophomore literature program) say they do. E314L and E314V have the dual tasks of introducing students to our discipline and preparing them for success in upper-division courses. To achieve these tasks, all variants of E314L and E314V bring questions of method and approach to the foreground, although the specific literary materials studied in individual courses may differ.

CRITICAL SKILLS AND METHODS: Whatever other critical skills or scholarly methods they may 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 had ample 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. They should have received some instruction in the sorts of PCL research English majors perform and have had at least one opportunity to practice such research.

CRITICAL APPROACHES AND ORIENTATIONS: 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 these different sorts of questions to a work will lead to different sorts of answers. Specifically, all 314L and V courses should introduce students to--and give them practice in--three rubrics of analysis that can be heuristically designated 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, sexuality, and nation.

The imperative to introduce students to these three critical approaches does not necessarily mean that you should have three separate "units" on your syllabus, one devoted to each approach, although that tripartite structure is an option that has worked well for some instructors. In reality, we all know that these divisions and labels are at least 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. Most important is that you help them develop a self-conscious awareness of critical possibilities. This can sometimes be achieved, at least in part, by "flagging" critical approaches or even, for that matter, critical gestures as you or your students use them; at bottom, what we care most about is that your students know that there is such a thing as critical approach and that they have choices and options when they develop an interpretation of a text.
Your students should be aware, for instance, that one can begin one's critical inquiry about a text with a "formal" question such as, how do this poem's line breaks contribute to its meaning? Or, how does knowing the historically shifting meanings of the word shrewd change our understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"? By contrast (a contrast, recall, that is only heuristic), one might begin with a "cultural" question such as, how does this text represent gender and/or sexual identities and hierarchies? Does the text represent gender identity as natural, essential, and immutable, or does it suggest other possibilities? (Or, better yet, what aspects of the text suggest that gender identity is natural…and what aspects suggest that it is always socially produced, contradictory…?) Finally, one might also start with a "historical" question such as, how does knowing something about Renaissance discourses of discovery and colonization (and/or discourses of science and alchemy) enrich our understanding of The Tempest? How do changing journalistic practices in eighteenth century England (or in the late nineteenth century U.S.) help to explain given features of x novel?

WRITING: All sections of E314 are taught with what the university calls 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 (8 pages or longer) research-based term papers or projects. At least one of your writing assignments, however, should give students an opportunity to employ the library research skills you will have taught them. Our recommendation here is that the final paper you assign should be 5-6 pages long and should require students to reference two sources outside of the primary text or texts that constitute the essay's main focus. (Those other three sources might be criticism or reviews, historical or contextual material, other primary material, even an OED entry--what's important is that they use databases or other library resources to find their sources.) It is important not to allow your students to substitute paraphrase of secondary sources (even if properly acknowledged) for their own close critical engagement with whatever material they are writing about.

TEXTS: E314L and E314V are courses in which you are expected to hew at least fairly closely to established syllabi, samples of which can be found by clicking on the name of a given variant. Your final syllabus should be constructed in consultation with your faculty mentor. In any case, she must formally approve it.