Advanced Literature & Criticism: Wonders and Sublimity

In this year-long, advanced-level class, students will explore different critical approaches to canonical literature, considering a breadth of literary theory. This course will engage students in reading peer-reviewed scholarship about literary texts. Over the course of the year, students will be challenged to situate their original close-readings of literature in relation to at least one scholar or critic, showing how their theses build on, develop, or constructively critique past scholarship. The goal of the course is to guide students through the basics of research in the field of literary studies and to prepare them for college-level English. The fall semester focuses on the theme of "wonders in paradise," looking at the dual meaning of "wondrous" as both monstrous and miraculous. Although the course focuses on seventeenth-century British literature, it incorporates an emphasis on intertextuality; thus, we also consider postcolonial Caribbean writers who approach this theme. The spring semester focuses on the theme "states of ecstasy" wherein we look at heightened landscapes that confuse boundaries between objective and subjective experiences. The semester moves selectively through literary history from Romanticism to contemporary literature and takes both American and British texts as its key texts.