About the Major Seminar
CLT 389, the “Major Seminar,” is designed to provide you with an advanced introduction to the study of language, literature, and culture. Here you will find the tools to enable you to begin to understand, among other things, the literary use of language, what constitutes a specific literary genre, how language and human subjectivity inform one another, and what it is we do when we study the literature and culture of a given community or group--indeed, we will examine the question of how literature can and does help to coalesce a community or group in the first place.
The course readings fall into categories roughly corresponding to: theories of language; formal approaches to the study of literature; political approaches to literature; psychoanalysis, the unconscious, and subjectivity; human subjectivity and language; sexuality and gender; multiculturalism; the gaze and popular culture; and cultural studies.
One of the principal goals of this course is to help you develop your research and writing skills. Accordingly, some of your assignments will be centered on bibliographic work. Additionally, we will work on developing your capacity to identify the principal lines of an argument in literary and cultural studies, and to focus your own thinking in order to develop cogent theses in your written work and the supporting arguments to illustrate them. You will put all of your reading and writing skills into practice by writing a twenty-page research-based paper at the end of the semester.
Most students in this course will have little or no familiarity with the material, and the course is designed with the beginner in mind. Accordingly, you will find a “critical reading guide” (CRG) to accompany many of the readings. The reading guide will provide information and ask questions that you should consider as you do the reading for a given assignment. You will be asked to hand in your answers to some of the reading guide questions—those marked on the syllabus with two asterisks (**) must be handed in in class on the day indicated. There is no such thing as a late CRG, so be sure to hand yours in on the day indicated.
The work in this class is three-fold: reading, writing, and discussing. You will read a significant amount of literary and cultural theory in order to become conversant with the major trends and movements in the disciplines involved in the study of language, literature, and culture. As noted above, you will also write short, directed responses to some of the readings, roughly every three weeks or so. Finally, you will complete a seminar paper of approximately 20 pages on a topic of your choosing (with help and guidance from the instructor and other students) and based upon your own interests and research.
You will find that discussing your ideas aids enormously not only in helping to formulate and focus them, but also in clarifying some of the less familiar difficult concepts you read about. Ideas will come to you as you discuss that you might not think of were you to consider this material strictly on your own. Accordingly, not only does class participation figure into your final evaluation, but you will be responsible for helping your classmates specify their research topics and giving them guidance in the writing of their essays. That will take the form of guided peer reading and editing.
The course is conducted in seminar format, which means that the instructor will not lecture. You are responsible for shaping the direction of the discussions according to your own interests. You will find that the amount of reading asked is consistent with your other courses; some of it might be unfamiliar and hence slightly more difficult, so you should give yourself plenty of time to complete each assignment.