Project DescriptionThe book will have two separate, yet related and connected pedagogical goals. The first is to provide training in literary and cultural theory and to impart to students basic literacy in the oftentimes difficult ideas that constitute the field. We intend to explain theoretical ideas in a manner that will be easy to grasp and that will be linked to the everyday experiences of students as cultural consumers and cultural practitioners.The part of the book devoted to teaching students how to use those ideas will focus on writing, specifically, the analytic essay. The goal will be to train students to analyze cultural artifacts as well as social issues and political events from their own everyday lives in a theoretically informed manner. In this part of the book, they will receive instruction in how to write analytically and with critical acumen about the world they inhabit.We will begin with ideas such as "hegemony," "ideology," "differential," "subaltern," and "identity." After reading introductory explanations of these theoretical concepts and constructs, students will be asked to engage with several short selections from theorists in each field.

Those selections will be included in the book, and we will provide a wide enough range of selections so that instructors can develop a variety of curricular models of their own design from them. We will then ask students to think about objects, events, people, and issues from the world around them using the theoretical ideas. For example, after reading our basic introduction to gender theory and postcolonial theory along with a selection or two from theorists in the field, we will propose that they view films such as Brokeback Mountain or Life and Debt. We will then ask students to compose analytic essays regarding the films that are guided by the concepts contained in the introductory material. Teachers would be urged to ask students to make connections between the theories, the cultural artifacts, and current issues in the world.While the purpose of the book is to teach students to think theoretically about the world, we feel that this goal can best be reached by teaching students to write analytically. We take a developmental approach to learning how to write an analytical essay. The skills required to write analytically must be developed in a step by step process that builds foundations and grows in complexity.

In the earliest stage of the pedagogy, students learn how to establish a critical framework and to use it to conduct classifications.Further along in the writing process, we provide training in logical reasoning and ask students to use such logical tools as consequence and derivation in their own writing. A possible assignment at this point in the course would be to analyze a political speech or a newspaper editorial for their use of both logic and the fallacies of reason.As training in the writing process proceeds and as students learn to conduct more complex forms of analysis, we ask students to become more skilled at using different critical frameworks to analyze both cultural artifacts and the world around them.Without always knowing it, students understand the world they live in using theoretical frameworks, and often, they are not aware of the cultural and ideological assumptions embedded in those frameworks. We will ask students to think about how the new critical ideas to which they are being introduced can help produce different understandings and different analyses of the world in which they live. The goal is to make them aware of the cultural assumptions, values, and ideas they rely on alwa.