Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through ...

“Criticism,” according to Northrop Frye, “is badly in need of an organizing principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as ...

IN “Dead Poets Society” (1989), John Keating, a teacher at a 1950s American boarding school, played by Robin Williams, draws a chart, its shape dictated by a fictional essay called “Understanding ...

Anyone who has taught a college literature course has likely heard a student say, “Can’t I just enjoy the book?” This frustration with literary theory is common. Many undergraduates feel that theory ...

New studies using an MRI machine to track the flow of blood in the brain show how close reading of literacy texts increases multiple complex cognitive functions. In this experiment, participants were ...