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.

As we seem to have become more collectively tired and less grounded in our bodies, self-care has become an ubiquitous hashtag in the twenty-first century. However, its origin is in Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and her essay “A Burst of Light” and comes from a very different radical political tradition than the ones familiar to anyone on the Internet, one that is not metaphorical at all—one that is recognizable as crip. Crip theory itself is the intersection of feminist, queer, and disability theory. In this course we will map out the historical and political discourses around disability particularly as it intersects with race, gender, and sexuality. Beyond the platitudes of “self-care,” we will delve into the realities and representations of intersectional disability, of inhabiting bodies that are measured and evaluated by the state, and of inhabiting bodies that are often only seen as metaphors. We will discuss disability and how its theoretical representations throughout nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century American literature informs how we can read literature today through the work of crip theorists. We will focus on demonstrating ways to read disability in texts and the theory behind the practice.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills