Literature comforts, conscripts, conceals and criticizes, but above all, it gathers people and meanings across time and space. And somehow, even sitting silently on a shelf, it seems to matter quite a lot. This course asks: what is literature? why does it matter? and how should we make sense of it? Zooming in on just a few touchstone English-language texts in various literary genres – the novel, poetry, the short-story, and even television – and reading several critical takes on each, students will gain a familiarity with the critical tradition, and the analytic frameworks that guide the study and interpretation of literature today, including ecocriticism, disability, race, and queer theory. Pursuing their own approaches, students will ultimately write a critical essay about a literary work of their choosing. Texts include Robinson Crusoe, the poems of Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and The Wire.

Class Format:

Online