It's a Yale Open Courses class so there are YouTube videos, but I found Fry's speaking style so grating I decided to buy the book. There are 26 chapters, and most chapters have you read two or three outside essays, which are fairly easy to find on today's internet, and fairly difficult to read because (as I should have guessed from the book’s title) it turns out the class is less about literature and more about philosophy (I would describe reading philosophy as equivalent to drinking out of a container labeled "HEADACHE JUICE".) You'll span hermeneutics, modes of formalism, semiotics and structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches, Marxist and historicist approaches, theories of social identity, and neo-pragmatism (and that's just what's written on the back cover, and also, hardly scratching the surface) which turns out is a lot for the brain to soak in when not spread out over 13 weeks. But, considering the density and breadth of the material, Fry does a pretty good job of keeping the class focused on its core ideas, even as he's seemingly steering everyone off-course. Would I say I got what I was expecting? Well, no. Was I exposed to far more ideas than I was expecting, far more than I ever needed? God, yes. Did I retain most of them? No—seemed like any new information I learned would push whatever previous information I learned out of my brain. Lucky I was taking notes. Four stars.