This class introduces students to the practices of literary analysis to open the way to more advanced work in the major and beyond. The main concern of this course is to identify how, through its formal properties, a text “enacts” its unique literariness. Through close reading, quotation, and interpretation of passages we will demonstrate how such moments—as “events of literature”—make meaning.
The remix and remixing lie at the heart of our examination of poetry, short stories, and the novel. We will consider how literary traditions and generic conventions both change over time, but also continue to manifest in contemporary literature. As such, we will position “classic” literary works such as Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s free verse alongside contemporary remixes and renditions of these poems. We will consider how the short story reimagines the fairy tale or gothic literature; and how a post-modern novel reconceives of traditional narrative in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. through comic-book geekery.
The principal activity of this class will be reading individual texts of poetry and prose. We will spend a lot of time on a single work to account for the literary activity and meaning of each. Central to our discussion of these works will be theoretical questions literary studies pose, particularly “What is literature?” With this question in mind, we will consult the work of scholars who examine what constitutes this thing called “literature.” We will also address the matter of literature’s pleasure and how this relates to critical endeavors.
Finally, the point of this class will be to expand our understanding of critical and aesthetic responses to literature, advancing ourselves in literary criticism in newer and professional ways. Therefore, we will consider the importance of “reading”: how it is both a sign of institutional literacy anda process of interpretation. We’ll talk about and the many ways of close reading, including deep, suspicious readings, and surface, “naïve” readings. We’ll layer our discussions with key terms such as narration, metaphor, and tone, appreciating how the point is less to apply these concepts to works of literary art than to see how such works are in fact staging those phenomena in remarkable ways.