This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

A great deal of fiction is oriented around protagonists who are "growing up wrong" — out of step with the expectations of adults and their peers, and deeply conflicted about the shape of their own desires and aspirations (at the very moment that they are trying to define those desires and aspirations for themselves). These characters may rebel or sabotage themselves, search for a new home or a new friend or a new lover—all while struggling to see and feel the world as it truly is or might be. If their present is in crisis, it's often because their future is in question too. In this seminar, we'll explore a wide variety of short stories and novels about growing up — diverse in their narrative strategies and tone as well as in the stories they tell — from authors ranging from Tillie Olsen and Toni Morrison to Hanif Kureishi and Ocean Vuong. As a seminar in "practices of literary study," this course is part of the English major's core curriculum and aims to help you develop some of the "core" skills of literary and cultural analysis — namely, how to read closely and critically, with an eye to literary language, genres, forms, and contexts; how to gather together smaller observations and generate a cogent argument about a work of literature; and how to write persuasively and forcefully, with your arguments tied well to the evidence you present and gloss. Across the term, we will be working on the skills of close reading and annotation, and will build from shorter assignments to one longer one.

Book List

Dan Clowes, Ghost World (1995)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974)
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

Requisites

• Students with 1-6 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills