> This course will explore the relationship between literature and society, or the multiple ways in which short stories and novels express or engage social and political realities. We will focus in particular on the representation of “conscience,” or how histories of colonialism shape the representation of human self-consciousness in the twentieth century. We will focus in particular on how histories of colonialism shape the representation of human consciousness in the twentieth century. Our primary texts are likely to include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians alongside short fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Junot Diaz and poetry by C.P. Cavafy, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Claude McKay, and Lynn Emanuel. In addition to introducing strategies for interpreting literature in relationship to their social and historical context, this course will provide practice in close reading techniques, group discussion, and academic writing tasks. While this course aims to acquaint students with some of the common conventions of reading and discussing fiction within an academic context, fostering a general enjoyment of reading is likewise a central objective. This course satisfies the University’s W requirement by requiring 10-12 pages of graded out of class writing.
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> Required texts will include:
> Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
> Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
> Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
> J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
> Course Reader with short fiction and poetry