Required of students in Writing and Literature. Ways of Reading focuses on a particular canonical author or text(s), utlizing various critical perspectives and secondary sources to support a deeper understanding of the work. The course further develops and reinforces practical skills in close reading, historical contextualization, applied critical theory, and the use of discipline-specific research tools and resources, encouraging conscious reflection on critical presuppositions and practices. This course prepares students to emter the Critical Essay Workshop.

A master of horror, inventor of the detective story, America?s first great critic and editor, a postmodernist who wrote seventy years before modernism was itself a movement, the subject of worship and infamy, Edgar Allan Poe is as much as a figure of legend as he is a writer. There's even a football team named after one of his poems. He is one of our most widely read authors, and perhaps most misunderstood. This Ways of Reading literature course will examine the stories, the poems, the essays and correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the criticism of his most bitter enemies and ardent supporters. We?ll explore both the contexts of his work in 19th century America and the long shadow of his influence up to this day.