ENG 408 - Reader Response

Semester Hours: 4

Our course will explore how textual strategies work on the minds of readers and how, in turn, readers bring a part of themselves to bear on textual interpretation. We will talk with each other and with readers outside of our classroom as we study concepts of emotion, perception, and memory in texts and in readers’ responses to them. Texts will span genres and will likely include Dickens’s Oliver Twist (novel + musical clips), James’s The Turn of the Screw (novella), Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (film), Bechdel’s Fun Home (graphic novel + musical clips), and Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (poetry).