This course will provide an introduction to reading literature, both in print and film. To that end, the course objectives are to teach you “habits of mind,” literary/critical terminology, and reading practices as a general disposition and techniques to approach, read, and analyze literature critically, thoughtfully, and intellectually.

To ground these goals, the course content focuses on the relation between nationalism and literature. More specifically, we will be tracking representations of death/violence as a motif that aides in the forging of national identity. To that end, we will ask the following questions throughout the course: how does the way in which death, violence, and mourning get represented produce a particular form of national identity? Who or what gets ‘forgotten’ in each form of remembrance?

Course Texts:
Alice Walker's Meridian (1976)
Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996)
Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006)
Selections of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities
Nathaniel Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831)