Potential/Desired Learning Outcomes for upper-division literature courses

Students learn to keep in mind and to consider how general theoretical assumptions/premises inform their understanding and analyses of literature and culture, as expressed in these examples/statements:

• In Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Culler comments on the dilemma of determining meaning: "If we must adopt some overall principle or formula, we might say that meaning is determined by context, since context includes the rules of language, the situation of the author and reader, and anything else that might conceivably be relevant. But if we say that meaning is context-bound, then we must add that context is boundless: there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text. Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless" (67).
• If literature puts our identities into play, sometime precariously, it may be understood as enabling us to experiment with possible selves and to instruct us about what positions or places we (should/might) take in the world.
• Fictions thus not only reflect but make culture, with consequent effects that may police behavior or that may challenge the reigning assumptions of a given culture, to test alternative ways of being or seeing.
• Familiar, repeated stories (plots) may reassure us about the order/relations /values (ideology) those stories represent and enact.
• We need such repeated plots because in some way the stories do not fully satisfy our desires or accomplish their functions and goals. Each story contains some loose end that unravels its effect, and often this unraveling occurs because the text depends upon a figure or system of figurative language that can be analyzed to show how the text’s figures and rhetorical aims attempt to contain and occlude conflicts that the text cannot fully resolve.
• Language is a system of figures through which our ideas and knowledge become possible, and through which we “agree” upon what is “true.” Yet this awareness of the social and systemic nature of meaning also enables us to challenge received and practiced values and meanings.
• This awareness of how meaning can be both “determined” by some groups and then made “indeterminate” by others, and the notion of exploring how texts fail to fulfill their purposes, undermines our confidence in being able to determine or to control meaning—or to agree upon interpretation and to reach mutual understandings as we choose and negotiate among “relevant” contexts for deciding upon particular meanings.
• Furthermore, not only are the contexts and premises to which we appeal to settle differences subject to dispute, intentions themselves are “shadowy and unstable,” riddled with repressed desires and meanings.
• Hence, we seek to find ways to relate determinacy and indeterminacy, to mediate or confer among different contexts and positions (see opening quote from Jonathan Culler above).

• What is at stake therefore in understanding literature participates in determining what comprises our identities and relations to others, to concepts of community, to ethical obligations and rights, and to the problems (or virtues) of positing others or indeed ourselves as singular, as unknowable.
• Identity is difference—and is therefore contingent: terms/identities, are defined in differential, dependent relation to other terms; a thing is constituted in its identity by its difference from other things that it is not. For example, “Illegitimate” violence is defined in relation to what is considered “legitimate” violence. “Because things relate in an essential way to other things . . . because they are connected, you can’t separate them into neat identities that serve one’s self-interested purposes for long without the contingency, the insubstantiality and impermanence, of those acts of identity-making becoming evident” (An Introduction to Criticism: Literature/Film/Culture--Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
• We all live in the past: most things are the end result of previous events and they are often more like echoes than things. But (too often) some focus instead on the present as what is real, and may even assert that no archeology can be performed to show how the present derives from the past or rests on its ruins.
• The world is all there is: contemporary theory seeks to see connections not apparent in an empirical mode of thinking, and seeks as well to counter overly speculative beliefs in hidden expressions of spirit behind events/people, as if there were some ultimate cause.
• Literature provides us with a way of understanding how our social life works. Human social life consists of narratives for living, with ‘narratives’ being understood here as an actual life experience spread over time and guided by cultural stories that justify it to participants. Both the cultural and real-world narrative can change; both use frames to exclude norm-dissonant perspectives and values and to ensure that the meanings that support the continuity and homogeneity of the lived process are stable, predictable, and enforced. Who tells the stories in the culture thus largely shapes how that cultural world will be organized. Stories are what people believe and how they believe, and how people believe determines how they act and how they live. Stories can change how people think, perceive, believe, and act. The analysis of the work they perform is thus an important endeavor. And that is what criticism is all about. (An Introduction to Criticism: Literature/Film/Culture--Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

In English 429 students will learn, develop, and strengthen abilities
- to understand and to explain the post-1945-contemporary historical dimensions of literary characters’ desires for and relation with others, including social negotiations and ideological debates over valued identities and principles, particularly as these desires and relations are understood as rhetorical functions and effects of the literary work and its contexts
-to inquire into the varying degrees of authority or power exercised and available to characters in a representative range of contemporary fiction in different modes and genres from the 1950s to the present, especially as such authority figures in (and is figuratively related to) class status, gender, race, ethnicity, and other determinants and influences (institutions/ideologies/nation-states including American, Anglo-Irish)
-to analyze how social identities are represented and enacted rhetorically in literature and language and through narrative structure and style
-to explore the extent to which the desires and power relations and identities in literary works are shown to be in flux, dramatized as being put into question or engaged in a debate among different social, political, class, gender, ethnic, religious/ideological arrangements
-to write a substantial critical essay that engages with a literary text and its critical interpretation/reception by identifying problems, developing claims and arguments, and enriching literary understanding, interests, and commitments
-to incorporate primary and secondary research into critical essay writing that explains how the interpretation of the evidence supports the claims of the argument being made about the meaning, power/effects, and structure of the work

-learn that arguments in literary criticism analyze examples in order to come to broader conclusions--these arguments therefore demonstrate inductive reasoning that moves logically and persuasively from particular pieces of compelling evidence (including the reasons that the evidence supports the argument/claims) to broader generalizations that advance/deepen/enrich understanding
-learn that for an argument to be convincing, the relationship between generalizations or assertions and supporting evidence must be considered carefully. This includes learning to qualify a generalization in the face of contradictory evidence so that one does not ignore the exception and does not suppress such evidence in order to continue to assert a generalization.

UI Department of English “Desired Skills and Outcomes” for 400-level literature classes
•          Helps students develop more depth in their analysis and writing by spending more time with a focused body of literature
•          Continues to reinforce close reading, research skills, and analytical writing strategies from 300-level courses
•          Continues to help students investigate how literary texts shape and reflect their particular contexts, including major movements in literary history
•          Continues to emphasize a diverse range of voices and perspectives
•          Continues to help students with a diverse range of interests and learning styles to develop investment in the texts they’re reading—using a range of assignments, potentially including multimedia assignments, online discussions, individual or group presentations, debates, films, creative projects, group work, and other strategies
•          Helps students engage more thoroughly in scholarly conversations about literature—building from their research skills and use of texts in previous classes to position themselves in dialogue with critical discussions
•          Requires more substantial research
•          Requires original and well-developed theses in response to literature
•          Provides more opportunities for students to direct their own education and interests—by encouraging them to decide on their research interests, give presentations, lead discussions and/or otherwise show investment and engagement with the material that goes beyond what the instructor has given them
•          Trains students to write longer sustained analytical essays that evidence close reading of the literature, engage with critical sources, and ask meaningful questions of the literature and its construction. Students should be able to sustain an analysis of 10 or more pages, and should write approximately 20-25 pages of analysis during the semester (potentially including shorter analytical responses in addition to more sustained essays).
•          Builds on previous levels (and anticipates graduation) by helping students understand real-world applications of English studies
•          Supports continued exploration of theoretical perspectives on literary and cultural studies, enabling students to reflect upon, compose, and articulate with greater sophistication the ways that they engage with critical theory and practice

Students in the literature emphasis will learn

1) to write sustained essays that evidence close reading of works in literature and film, that engage with critical scholarship, theory, and practice, and that advance well-developed theses to analyze works’ meanings and formal qualities.

2) to understand through literature how our social life works—how literature and social life undergo change and can change how people think, perceive, believe, and act.

Desired general learning outcomes for the B.A. in English:
1) Students exhibit knowledge of diverse literatures in English and the cultural and historical contexts in which these works were produced.
2) Students can discern and evaluate the aesthetic and formal qualities of various texts.
3) Students can write an analytic essay that exhibits both critical thinking and effective argumentation.
4) Students can write a research essay that exhibits effective deployment of research as evidence.
5) Students’ writing exhibits correct usage of grammar and of MLA format and citation conventions.

Additional (somewhat re-stated) possibilities for your consideration of what you might hope to learn within the English major, particularly within the literature emphasis:

Students will learn, develop, and strengthen abilities

-to identify and to analyze cultural, social, ideological, historical, linguistic, and other aspects of works of literature and film

-to analyze works of literature and film, orally, in writing, and in other modes of presentation

-to develop a complex understanding of themselves in relation to others and to their world as they engage with “big questions” and matters of value, and as they explore new ideas and experiences through literature and film

-to analyze interpretive, ideological, and rhetorical conflicts and contradictions in works of literature and of film across culture and history, in different modes and also including diverse forms of narrative, poetry, and drama, and in “debate/conversation” with peers, faculty, and other voices, including published scholarship

-to articulate their affective and reflective/intellectual engagement with works of literature and film—a sense of “what’s at stake and why such engagement matters”