ENG 220 - Literary Analysis
Fall 2025
Instructor: Vincent
Course Description: This course introduces students to the analysis of literature across a wide range of forms, including the poem, novel, play, and film. We will read some of the most famous works of literature from antiquity to the present, while engaging with them both critically and creatively. Along the way, students will develop foundational skills in literary criticism and become more perceptive and discerning readers.
Spring 2026
220-A
Instructor: Fox
Course Description: Literary critics are so much more than critical killjoys, so much more than sleuths hunting for a text’s One True Meaning.
Learning to be a literary critic takes practice, but there is profound pleasure in unearthing unexpected ideas or extending literary conversations. Critics help us ponder larger philosophical questions beyond the texts themselves. They can also help us see how texts reflect the social, economic, political, and embodied realities of their time and ours. They invite us to enter intellectual and artistic conversations that have preceded us and will continue long after us.
But how do critics do what they do? This course focuses intensely on learning how to be a literary critic by developing well-supported intellectual arguments that offer an interpretation of a text. These arguments will be debatable and original to you.
This class is for anyone who wants to learn to analyze literary texts, and by extension, learn how to think and write critically about them. The skills we practice will serve you well regardless of major as a model for how to engage in thoughtful reading, principled interpretation, and well-supported writing. We will do this by making intensive study of four full-length literary works over the semester. We will learn about creative and interpretive strategies through careful attention to reading, composition, use of primary and secondary evidence, and extensive revision based on the feedback of your audience.
220-B
Instructor: Rippeon
Course Description: This section of English 220 is specifically designed to meet the requirements for students thinking of majoring in English or in Africana Studies. It should also be of interest to students who simply wish to learn how to engage in critical analyses of novels, poems, short fiction, plays or film. The course is an introduction to the tools critics utilize when they engage in literary analyses and the differences in approaches to literatures written by writers from dissimilar backgrounds. For example, we’ll explore the most appropriate tools for dissecting a novel by James Baldwin, and how the critical implements might differ for an interrogation of a text by Charlotte Bronte, or a play by William Shakespeare and one by Aime Césaire.
Writing, reading, and substantive discussion are all required.
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