6 credits| Prof. Daniel Vukovich
This course introduces you to ways of thinking about culture and society through the close-reading of world literature, including poetry as well as realist and experimental fiction. It does this through the literature in itself, which is to say that we emphasize contextual, historical, and textual analysis. Literature is part of the world in its own as well as our own terms, which is to say it is deeply human, it illumninates our common problems and lives, but it also requires certain tools or concepts to excavate and appreciate its meanings.
To paraphrase the Roman poet Horace, all art seeks to move, instruct, or delight us. To do this, such texts reflect as well as refract the societies and contexts from which they are made and later — sometimes hundreds of years later — are read. And they must further make an implicit – or sometimes explicit — claim or even an argument about the world or society from which they emerged. This can be specific, or it can be a general point about what it means to live as a finite, mortal human being in a complicated world full of other people.
As strong readers and critics in our own time and places, we must attend to all of this carefully. This power of art may happen through the author’s intent, or simply through the usual ways that language and reading work on and through readers.
Put simply, texts always have something to say to us, right now right here, even if they always speak to their own times and contexts in the past. Thus we can learn a great deal from reading them closely: knowledge about about their own times and worlds, but also about our own times and world. After all, as humans we share certain problems, issues, and experiences with many other people, even if we also differ from them in other, important ways. We all die. We all live in a society. We all want to feel happy; yet we all struggle with that pursuit.
I will introduce terms from literary criticism to help guide you along in making sense and meaning out of our texts and topics (e.g., narration, point of view, ambiguity, allegory, theme, irony, characterization). Other terms will also come up through the readings or secondary sources or my lectures (e.g. class/money, capitalism, modernity vs antiquity, free will vs determination, imagination, existentialism, faith or belief, the unconscious and consciousness). A crucial point here: these terms are not just concepts but also real problems inherent to our lives.
Finally, my teaching philosophy is this: My task is to place you into an encounter with these texts, to enable them to make a mark on you, just as you make a mark on them when you read in a strong, active way.
Note: Students who want to major or minor in Comparative Literature are required to take CLIT1001 or CLIT1008 or CLIT1009 or CLIT1010.
Assessment: 100% coursework.