School of Arts Taster Session: English

What are the tools that we use to understand literature? If we think that literary texts have meaning, how do we find out what this meaning is? In this session we will explore what the term ‘theory’ might mean—is it something we ‘do’? Is it simply a mode of thinking? We will also explore why it is crucial to our lives as literary scholars, both inside and outside the classroom, because it makes us pay attention to the significance of race, class, and gender, and to ideas about ourselves and others (both conscious and unconscious) that we can find embedded in works of literature.