Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon successful completion students should able to:

1. Recognize and understand the variety of stylistic choices that authors make within given forms and how form influences meaning.
2. Articulate ways in which the text contributes to self-understanding.
3. Engage, through the text, unfamiliar and diverse cultures, experiences and points of view, recognizing the text as a product of a particular culture and historical moment.
4. Understand the text within the context of a literary tradition or convention.
5. Evaluate various interpretations of a text and their validity through reading, writing, and discussion in individual and group responses analyzing the support/evidence for a particular interpretation.
6. Conduct research to find materials appropriate to use for literary analysis, using MLA conventions to document primary and secondary sources in written responses to a literary text

Assessment tools may include informal responses to study questions; evaluation of small- and full-group discussion; in-class and out-of-class writing; formal essays, as well as informal responses to study questions and other types of informal writing; presentations by individuals and groups; short and long essay exams; close reading exercises using support/ evidence; writing exercises which include evaluation of various interpretations of a text and their relative validity. Both instructor and peer evaluation may be incorporated in the assessment process.

• 
   
• feminist theory
  setting
• psychoanalytic theory
  plot
• Marxist theory
  point of view
• structuralist theory                       
  tone/voice
• postmodern theory
  narrative styles
• reader response theory
  narration: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person
• new historicism
  omniscient, etc.       
• biographical criticism
  unreliable narrator gender
  rhetorical strategies      
• race
  diction
• evidence
  character
• climax  
• documentation
  denouement
  thesis
  symbol                         
  imagery                                               
• intertextuality
  regional or national literatures
  flashback
  ambiguity
  irony
  allusion
  censorship
  stereotyping
  class
  form/structure
•  dialogue                       
• contextualizing;
• sources/influence
   
• expgenres of fiction
  lication of the text
  
  Competencies and Skills
  
  analysis
  synthesis
  understanding prose fiction through contexts such as society, politics, 
  artistic conventions, multiple interpretations of an author, etc.
  writing about fiction
  close readings
  critical reading employing reviews and critical essays
  speaking and listening reflectively
  small-group collaboration
  
  
  
   

theme