This course follows on English 202. It is designed to provide English majors with an in depth experience of the practice of literary study. Clearly there are many ways to study literature and our understanding of the “best” or “most useful” practices continue to be contested and changed over time. In this course we will focus on three critical frameworks that have become dominant in the contemporary academy and that inform work done by members of the profession (and the UW department) today: Marxist materialism, feminism, and critical race theory. By contrast to earlier models of literary criticism, particularly New Criticism (which we will discuss so that we know what we are critiquing) which sought to find in literary texts transcendent messages and universal meanings, the frameworks we focus on in this course situate texts within their historical context of production and reception and seek to understand the power dynamics, including dynamics informed by gender, race, and class, that necessarily shape their meaning and message, as well as their style and form. Our study of these critical frameworks will involve us in close, intensive reading of dense theoretical arguments about literature and of a few key texts by major modern thinkers that have impacted how we interpret literature in less direct, but no less significant ways. In addition, over the course of the quarter we will read several literary works; we will consider how our understanding of each is shaped by the critical frameworks we have developed and how each, in turn, reveals the (in)adequacy of these frameworks and/or suggests other ways of thinking about literary production. Theorists whom we will consider include: Marx, Freud, Althusser, Lukacs, Williams, Jameson, Sedgewick, Belsey, Spivak, McClintock, Carby, Smith, Gates, and Morrison. Literary texts include Melville, Woolf, Winterson, Kincaid, and Butler.