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.

This seminar begins from a simple observation: literary forms—poems, novels, plays—ask questions about our identities with a special force. Who are we? How do we illuminate who we are to others? And to ourselves? In this course, we will explore how literature takes up complex questions about human identity, questions whose richness—we will posit—other disciplines don’t always touch. For there is no lack of theories of persons, for instance, in philosophy or psychology. Yet poems and novels ask who we are with a unique power, and they allow us to see dimensions of ourselves that so often remain invisible or muted. We actually need literature, our seminar supposes, to be able to ask and to see who we are. Throughout the semester we will enlist works of poetry, prose, and drama to help us think about persons and identities. We will focus on four African American writers who reflect on identity in uncommonly rich and complex ways: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. We will explore the pictures of selfhood that these writers ask us to imagine against a backdrop of enduring ideas about robust subjectivity (William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman) and modernist statements on disillusionment with the self (Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett). The literary thinking about identity that we uncover in Hughes, Brooks, Baldwin, and Morrison will reanimate our imagination about the self and its world. This class satisfies the “Literatures in English” requirement for the English major.

Requisites

• Students with 1-6 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills