his course will adopt the most fundamental approach to the matter of “reading literature”: we will read a number of works that have been called “literary” and see what it is they do, why they have been made, and what might be the reason one would spend time reading them. We will take it for granted that everyone has certain preconceived notions about the what, why, and wherefore of literature. Instead of simply reinforcing those assumptions, we’ll try to test them against the texts themselves. In other words, our reading will be an experiment in which we study not only “literature” but also our own thinking.
To conduct this experiment, we will examine a broad sample pool of works that have been called “literary,” looking for constants and variables. We will begin with readings in one of the oldest textual traditions, namely the lyric poem, considering verses by Sappho, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Charles Baudelaire, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, and Bernadette Mayer. In other words, we’ll be going from Ancient Greece to late 20th-century America. As we read, we’ll examine poetic devices such as metaphor, voice, rhyme, and meter, as well as poetic tropes and genres, for their conceptual, aesthetic, and emotional consequences. For the second half of the quarter, the attention will shift to prose, as well as to the last 200 years (for reasons we’ll discuss), beginning with short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, moving to Nathaniel West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts, and ending with an extended examination of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. We will pay close attention to the strategies of narration, the function of character, and the role of plot, as well as the social, ethical, and philosophical implications of fiction. To aid our inquiry, throughout the quarter we will also examine some key theoretical literature (!) on these topics, testing the claims others have made against our own discoveries.
Students will be asked to participate actively in daily class discussion, prepare an annotated bibliography of secondary material, and give a brief presentation on their final paper. The writing will be divided up into three 2-page critical response essays; students will chose one of these essays to expand into a final 6-8 page paper.

Texts:

• Herman Melville. Bartleby & Benito Cereno. Dover Thrift Edition. [9780486264738]
• Nathaniel West. Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust. New Directions. [9780811202152]
• Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Perennial. [9780061120060]