English 200 is designed to offer techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience. Our class will focus on texts that test the boundary between the world of lived experience and the aesthetic representation of that experience. What responsibility does literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, have to the "real world" that it represents? What stake do we, as readers, have in the relationship between the two?

We will explore these questions by looking at a variety of texts and genres. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to building a critical vocabulary for talking about literature. We will read a number of poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before turning to Oscar Wilde's bizarre The Picture of Dorian Gray, which tests the limits of the relationship between life and art. In the second half, we will turn to two longer works that seem to have a closer relationship to what we might consider "reality": Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Dave Eggers' What is the What, an autobiographical novel of another person's life (!). Throughout, we will also consider other kinds of texts, which may include essays, short stories, memoirs, documentary films, and reality TV.

This course meets the University’s “W” requirement, which means you will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. You will satisfy this requirement by writing two 5-7 page papers, due at the middle and at the end of the quarter. Both papers will be read and commented on with revision in mind.

Course Readings:
Course pack, including shorter readings and critical texts (available the first week of the quarter at Ave Copy, 4141 University Way)
Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Faflak (Broadview). 978-1551114354
Dave Eggers. What is the What (Vintage). 978-0307385901
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Page (Broadview). 978-1551111261