This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

The adolescent has been at the crux of the American national imaginary for a century now, leveraged for its political power, its physical limitations, and its oddly slippery agency. This course is a historical examination of young adult literature beginning with the post-WWII conceptions and anxieties around the newly coined “teenager” and youth cultures. We will look through the different generic renditions of the young adult through—for example—the "problem novels" of the 1960s and 70s, the chick lit and “sick lit” of the 80s, 90s and 00s, and the fantasy novels that undergird the quick expansion of the YA marketing category at the turn of the millennium. We will explore how the “young adult” figure and genre has been used both as a tool of indoctrination and as a form of subversive social critique, taking the opportunity to engage with different theoretical approaches and literary histories, including psychoanalysis, Marxist thought, American sentimentalism, reception theory, or crip theory, as well as literary, historicist, and disability criticism—either through lectures or through short excerpted readings. This course contains a multimedia mixture of novels, films, episodes of television shows, social media and some critical reading.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills