The purpose of this course is to make you conscious of a variety of literary and film genres and critical approaches, and to prepare you for upper-level English and other Humanities courses, in terms of both your oral and written interpretive skills. To that end, we will look at many genres: poetry, (silent and sound) film, the essay, the short story, the novella and the novel. Paired with these primary sources will be essays reflecting forms of theory and interpretation prominent over the last hundred years arising from psychoanalysis, Marxism, media studies, gender studies, post-colonialism, disability studies, and ecocriticism. The texts and films are drawn from the Atlantic world since the era of Romanticism, with a particular emphasis on the 20th- and 21st-century reckoning with such issues as western modernity and its ideologies, especially in terms of class, colonialism, racial invention, normativity and sex. While all these works address processes of vanishing and finding, one of the issues that specifically emerges is how families and cultures hide, willfully or not, aspects of their own history, and the role of art and criticism in drawing out into the open that which has become hidden. I will foreground the various phases through which we move as we come to know our object of study closely, stages one might call: noticing, collecting, hazarding, staking, and reflecting. We will practice together doing these things and discuss how best to gain insight about a cultural and literary text in ways that matter to you, fulfill your curiosity, hone your talents, and make you a thoroughly attentive person. You will write a number of short reading responses and two shortish papers (4-5pp). Three likely novellas/novels are: Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Ellison, Invisible Man.

This course satisfies the following CURRENT English major/minor requirement: American Literature

This course satisfies the following NEW English major/minor requirements: Foundations and Methods (300/400-level), Regions: Americas, UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Time: Contemporary/Modern