ENGL 221
Reading the Signs Fall 2013
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

How have American authors imagined the activity of interpretation? What counts as a sign, and how do you know if you’re reading it accurately? This course will consider a wide range of texts that make scrutiny their central action: Jonathan Edwards and Thoreau reading the landscape for signs of cosmic meaning; Poe and Henry James piling up clues and feints in their detective and ghost stories; Faulkner setting up the impossible task of piecing together a history in Absalom, Absalom!; Pynchon detailing the paranoiac quest to find hidden order in The Crying of Lot 49. These texts about interpretation have, in turn, spurred literary scholars to their own interpretive efforts. So as we track the forms that American literature has given to the search for meaning, we’ll also walk through a range of literary-critical approaches to decoding, unpacking, and otherwise making meaning from that literature.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1677
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active class participation and about 20 pages of writing divided across 3 or 4 essays
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: first year students and sophomores considering the major
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Attributes: ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses

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