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.

This course is a study in the “enlightenment” as a concept and historical period with a specific focus on innovations in literary writing between the years 1680 and 1800. As a seminar on criticism, students will develop their skills in close reading and analytical writing by engaging key texts written in Britain and its colonies that address issues of nationality, governance, and racial and gender (in)equality. As students read this material, they will bear in mind a peculiar contradiction. On one hand, the years 1680 to 1800 were key to the formation of human rights, democratic politics, and religious tolerance. On the other hand, they entailed genocide and mass destruction through transatlantic slavery and (settler) colonialism in the Americas, West Indies, and South Asia. Students in this course will ask how writers of the enlightenment address this contradiction (if at all), and what legacies of the enlightenment are visible today.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills