English and Textual Studies 142 is a first-level course introducing students to the complex and significant issues at stake when we read texts of culture. Students study texts of the culture around them, ranging from advertisements to paintings; from television programs to plays and theatrical pieces; from poetry to political speeches; from song lyrics to contemporary and canonical novels.

The course is presented from the perspective of the major ideas about meaning and interpretive practice that have emerged throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Students learn that ideas about language, subjectivity, representation, and culture often intersect in lively debates that cross time and disciplinary boundaries. This course invites students to enter those debates as well and to discover for themselves a complicated but important ongoing dialogue about meaning—how it’s made and what’s at stake when it’s made.

ETS 142 is organized by various major themes of contemporary criticism and can take various forms. Students examine how language and meaning interrelate and how the subject position of a character in a story, the author, or even the reader influences the meaning the reader makes of a text. Students look at the historical situation of a text and determine how the text’s, the author’s, and even the reader’s place in history influences the meaning that is made.

Students investigate how power works among the characters in texts and the effects of power relationships in the society producing and consuming those texts. By the end of the course, the students will appreciate what is at stake when we read, how interpretive practice is shaped, and how we make meaning in our culture.

The course is designed as a workshop in which learning takes place through reading, writing, listening, and class interaction. Students write frequently, using informal papers, reading logs, dialogic journals, reaction papers, and either two formal papers and a major project or three formal papers in which they use constructs they have learned to analyze cultural texts.

Grades are based on both the informal writing and the formal papers/project, as well as on class participation.