LIT 100 CM - Literary Theory Since Plato

What is a good book? How do we decide whether a work of literature is worth reading? What is the basis of literary judgment? How do we bring history, religion, and myth to bear on our understanding of literary texts? How does imaginative literature differ from other forms of discourse? These are among the fundamental questions explored in this course through the eyes of major literary thinkers. The course examines literary criticism as a discipline with unique traditions of inquiry beginning with classical debates about form and reality and the tensions between the moral and aesthetic dimensions of literature as they have been engaged by such writers as Plato and Aristotle, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Arnold and Pater, Woolf, and Eliot.

Offered: Every spring

Credit: 1

Course Number: LIT 100 CM