The overall purpose of this class is to teach you to approach, read, and analyze literature critically, thoughtfully, and intellectually.

Literature is often understood to be a special form of imaginative/creative writing that gives access to "universal human knowledge" by rendering "immediate living experience." However, this unique status and capacity of literature, as Raymond Williams underscores, is achieved by the effective suppression of "the process and the result of formal composition within the social and formal properties of language" and the cultural and political circumstances that gave rise to such writing. In other words, literature is an ideological category that mediates a historical context and its modes of knowing. This mediation, however, is not simply the obscuring of history or the value-neutral accessing of history in all of its fecundity but rather a problematic by which come to know ourselves and others.

Therefore, the course centers on this problematic of history and literature through an exploration of forms of reading. Broadly, we will examine how the writing of history and literature are linked through questions of narrative form and representation. To do so, we will specifically engage with topics like the nation and death, revolution and memory, slavery and the body, war and trauma. And throughout, we focus how such narratives rely upon and make intelligible citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality as the terms by which we come know and feel ourselves.