ENCR 3400, University of Virginia, Spring 2019. Her Knowledge Commons deposit gives the course as "Introduction to Critical and Postcritical Reading."
The course asks how and why we read, and how reading for a class relates to reading for pleasure. Its first half surveys the major critical approaches of recent decades (structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory), with The Turn of the Screw as a shared test case. The second half turns to experiences of reading that literary theory tends to ignore or distrust: identification and recognition, empathy, enchantment, shock and the sublime, and fandom, ending with reading in public. Students write two essays on texts of their own choosing, one an exercise in critical reading and one in postcritical reading; careful analysis of the text and/or of reader response is among the criteria.
Posted with the kind permission of Rita Felski. Contact details have been removed. The original is deposited on Knowledge Commons.
