ENGL 355-01, Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Fall 2002

Abstract

This course has two purposes. The first is to study the literature of this century, a literature which chronicles and examines the massive changes I have described, as well as the more ineffable changes in thought and style that accompany them. The second purpose is to build skills in literary analysis, the most important of which is the skill of close reading. A "close reading" is the building-block of all literary criticism, and it involves a detailed examination of the language in one passage from a given work, in order to interpret that passage's meaning and its significance for the work as a whole. Debating these kinds of interpretations, and the linguistic evidence for or against, will be the central task of the semester, both in class and in your writing.