This course is intended to enable English majors to understand, and participate in, contemporary debates in literary history, literary criticism/theory, and the politics of interpretation. On the one hand, we will read and discuss both literary and critical/theoretical works as carefully as possible; on the other hand, we will reflect on the changing conventions of reading that can be, and have been, applied to these same texts. The meanings we find in the works we read are not those other people at other times and places would have found; and we will attempt to understand the nature of the historical forces that create these differences, while yet recognizing that the text “itself” provides limits to interpretation—that we cannot make the text mean just anything at all. We will focus on three pivotal historical moments: the Renaissance (key literary figure Shakespeare; about 1600), Romanticism (key literary figure Wordsworth; about 1800); and modernity (key literary figure: Chinua Achebe). We will read a few poems by Wordsworth, some sonnets by Shakespeare as well as The Merchant of Venice, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Types of literary theory that we will explore include: New Criticism, formalism, feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural materialism