Literature (LITR1-UC)

This course introduces contemporary global literature from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives. Selections may include contemporary works from Asia (east and/or south), the Middle East, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean or North and South America. Students practice techniques of close reading, evidence use, and other forms of literary analysis to engage critically and creatively with works in various genres from around the world.

Bursting from the corsets of Victorian constraint, the 20th century is said to be the century of alienation, transformation, and disintegration. Yet 20th-century writers were freed to create new forms, break conventional patterns, explore new realms for meaning and new possibilities for writing. At its beginning, writers such as Stein, Joyce, and Eliot worked against the grain of received language, embodied ideas in new ways, and dismantled conventional language. At its midpoint, two world wars, world economic depression, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima-displayed daily in film and print-destroyed our confidence that language could ever be adequate to name human experience. Yet writers such as Faulkner, O'Connor, Yeats, Stevens, Hemingway, Beckett, Ellison, Baldwin, and Morrison each find new ways to reawaken our sense of ourselves in our world.

This course examines colonialism's effects on literary articulations of history, identity, tradition, and belief. It explores new forms of consciousness and expression produced in the encounter between European colonizers and colonized people in the Caribbean, the Middle East, India, and other parts of Africa and Asia.

In this introduction to literary analysis, students will become active readers of literature. Together they will explore how to attend carefully to language, sound, syntax, structure, rhythm, musicality, and patterns. Students will learn the specific distinctions between the three major literary genres: poetry, drama, and fiction. In becoming close readers, students will also become aware of the relationship between cultural and literary transformation.

In this course students learn to recognize the central characters, metaphors, and ideas that comprise the classical consciousness of Greece and Rome. Works by Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Sappho, and others are studied both through traditional methods of close reading and the questions raised by structuralism and deconstruction. Students also acquire an understanding of classical literature as oral and theatrical genres.

Introduction to Literature: The Craft of Reading or permission of the coordinator). This course explores literary treatments of the environment in a global context. How have various authors explored the interaction of human beings with our natural environment? How has nature been represented and how have these representations changed our social, ethical and political metaphors?

This two-credit Contemporary Genres course focuses on a variety of contemporary experimental and hybrid forms that blur the edges of the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Students may take this course with a different subtitle twice for a total of four credits.

Introduction to Literature: The Craft of Reading or permission of the coordinator). This two credit Major Authors course allows for close inquiry and analysis of one author or a set of authors from a given historical period. Students may take this course with a different subtitle twice for a total of 4 credits.

Focuses on a different theme or topic each semester, for example: modern poetry or literature, an issue in media studies or a major author. The specific topic is listed in the course schedule for the semester.