Week 11 Course Profile: Introduction to Literary Theory (Eng 2300)

As we gear up for Thanksgiving break and the final push toward the end of the semester, I want to profile one last F24 English course, ENG 2300: An Introduction to Literary Theory. This course, which is one of two required courses for the English major, captures something distinctive about our English community at St. John’s: we like to think differently.

I visited Dr. Elda Tsou’s course last Thursday 11/14, where she talked with her students about Postcolonialism, including ideas such as Eurocentrism, Orientalism, and cultural hegemony. I wasn’t able to stay for the clip in which Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and host of the Daily Show, talked about growing up in a racially divided culture, but I did catch the class discussion about an interview with Homi Bhabha, in which he explained that the Enlightenment itself, which is a name given to intellectual and cultural developments across Europe and its colonies around the eighteenth century that gave rise to such events as the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, should also be understood as co-constituted with colonial imperialism.

The point is not only to provide students with a language to critique established pieties about American and World history – though those are good things to do! Rather, as Dr. Tsou explains, the thinking we call “Critical Theory” demonstrates how ideas we consider “the norm” or “normal” are themselves products of social, political, and economic forces. The construction of the common understanding, and ways in which we might re-construct it, are the central focus of Critical Theory.

I love ENG 2300, and I think of it as one of the courses that distinguishes the SJU English department. We are interested in lots of different things, from medieval poetry to hip hop to creative writing, film, and forms of literacy. But the connective tissue that we share are habits of critical thought – we don’t take “common sense” for granted, and we always try to understand how ideas come to assume the shapes they do. It’s such a great class!