This course will introduce students to some of the most significant and compelling trends in modern criticism-such as gender theory, deconstruction, new historicism, and psychoanalytic criticism-in an applied, hands-on way. The course will consider a few primary texts from different eras-a Shakespearean play, a nineteenth-century novel, a contemporary film, for example-each in terms of a variety of theoretical approaches. Can King Lear be read as a feminist text? a site of class struggle? a staging of the relationship between language and the unconscious? The course aims both to make familiar some of the critical methods students are likely to encounter in the field of literary studies these days, and to show how such methods can transform our understanding of a text, opening surprising possibilities even in familiar works. In the process, the course will also raise broader questions about the imperatives and usefulness of literary theory, even about what it means to be engaged in the discipline of literary analysis. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: 20 pages of writing in the form of short papers, and participation in a web-based forum. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). Preference to first and second-year students, and majors who have yet to take a Gateway course. This course is writing intensive. (Criticism)