Course schedule for the Graduate Certificate in Literature Program, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

This course provides an introduction to literary and critical theory by putting theoretical texts representing a variety of critical and interpretive approaches into dialogue with key literary and cinematic works. The focus of the class will be on the role of literature, film and other cultural forms—from the novel to lyric poetry, and from art film to mass culture—in the representation and narration of social life, as well as to multiple aesthetic and theoretical approaches to the interpretation, historical analysis and critique of the forms of individual and collective experience. Critical and theoretical readings will include writings by such figures as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukàcs, Edward Said, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Hortense Spillers, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière. We will also discuss the literary and cinematic works of such writers and filmmakers as Bertolt Brecht, G.W. Pabst, André Breton, Salvador Dali, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Assia Djebar, Ridley Scott, Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley and Jean Renoir. This course will also prepare students for graduate work in literature, film and the interpretation of culture by focusing on the possibilities and limits of different interpretive approaches, research methods and genres of academic writing.

This class satisfies the core course requirement for both the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Master of Arts in Literature programs.