This course will focus as much on selected American texts as the act of reading itself. What do we expect out of fiction in an age of declining readerships and the ascendancy of electronic media? We will read Nella Larsen’s Passing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and To Kill a Mockingbird, all books that are routinely hailed in different contexts as being exemplary cultural artifacts. While class time will be devoted to exploring critical readings of these texts, we will spend much time on examining why these texts have been heralded as bastions of literature. What is the relationship of the book to the “real world”? How does a text become “major,” and what effect does this naming have on the interior experience of reading? The final project for this course will involve picking a piece of text from fanfiction.net and thinking through how the issues of cultural weight and reading raised throughout the quarter apply when a story is self-published and self-generates!
its own legacy.