Texts and authors emerge from their historical and cultural contexts. So, too, do our ways of reading. In this class, we will investigate the various ways that novels, poems, drama, and other literary objects have been read in the last two-hundred years or so—as well as some of the most recent developments in literary theory. We will survey core texts and concepts in the theoretical approach to literature as well as the vocabulary students might use to discuss these approaches. We will together read and write about literary interpretation through movements and schools like formalism, new historicism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, disability studies, postsecular studies, and the “post-critical” turn from theory as such. To aid our critical conjectures, we will also read a novella during the semester—Henry James’s The Aspern Papers—and practice employing our theory with its pages as our material.