Area of Knowledge: Literature

Requirement

In the AOK Arts and Literature category, all three courses must emphasize arts or literature. At least one of the three courses must be in literature. At least one of the three courses must be in the arts.

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Rationale

Literature provides an imaginative record of all human experience. Drawing from all disciplines, it reexamines what has been thought and discovered and speculates about what could be. The methods of literary study improve students’ critical thinking skills as well as their writing and speaking skills. Intellectual engagement with literature during their college years helps students to develop the habit of reading, to find reading pleasurable, and thus to develop their inner resources of imagination, creativity, and sensitivity to the human condition.

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Goals

The overall goal of any course in literature is to help students become competent readers and interpreters (in both written and spoken form) of literary texts. Achieving this goal involves developing skills in careful reading and formal analysis, understanding the contexts—for example, historical, social, cultural, economic, and technological—that shape literature, and recognizing that there are different critical approaches in literary studies.

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Learning Objectives

Students will:

1. Read and analyze literary texts.
2. Recognize and apply a range of critical approaches.
3. Recognize and understand selected literary terminology and the development of literary forms, genres, and/or movements.
4. Become aware of the contexts that shape the creation and reception of literary texts.
5. Practice writing and speaking about literature, using a variety of forms
6. Use information resources, for example, by engaging in library or internet research or using instructional technology.

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Criteria

Courses will:

1. Introduce students to literary studies through a primary emphasis on verbal texts.
2. Provide guided and independent reading of challenging literary texts.
3. Develop ways of reading, such as close textual analysis, cultural critique, rhetorical approaches, historicist criticism, feminist criticism.
4. Feature texts related by subject matter, genre, historical period, or other social/cultural criteria.
5. Incorporate writing and speaking about literature as central course activities and assignments.
6. Include at least one assignment that asks students to use information resources.
7. If a literature course has a secondary emphasis on forms which are not primarily text-based (for example, film, music, or visual art) or on forms which are not composed primarily for artistic purposes (for example, mass media documents or ephemera), it will, nevertheless, analyze such texts mainly by using methods appropriate to literary studies.