Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines literary “classics”, variously defined, apprehending them both on their own terms and within larger critical conversations. May incorporate the comparative study of work in related artistic fields and engage relevant media trends. Includes attention to writing skills. Students with credit for ENGL 101W may not take this course for further credit. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Literary Classics, Whatever They Are  

All literary classics were once new releases. Readers first picked up these books and cracked their spines not because they were supposed to (“I mean, you have to read Shakespeare when you’re at university.”) but because they wanted to (“What are these weird sonnets by this Shakespeare dude I’ve heard about?”). So what makes a book—be it a novel, a collection of poems, or a manga—a “classic?” Do literary classics start out as literary classics, or do they earn classic status over a period of time and with critical and popular acclaim? What is lost for an older work when it is enshrined as a classic within a literary canon, and what might be gained for a new one when it is declared “an instant classic” or “a classic of its genre”?  

In this course we will focus on four very different works, each of which has been labeled, in one fashion or another, a classic. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, first published in 1609, and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, completed in 1794, are now considered classics of English literature (whatever that is), but their confirmed presence in the canon tends to diminish how radical and pathbreaking they were in their own time. Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, is regularly lauded as a classic of the science-fiction genre, but like other literary works pigeonholed into genre categories—sci-fi, mystery, romance, fantasy—it has only belatedly earned respect as literary fiction (whatever that is). Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga, re-imagines a classic Haida oral narrative in a visual vocabulary drawn simultaneously from contemporary Japanese Manga and traditional Haida imagery. What does it mean to call all of these varied works classics? How does it change the way we read them (for better and for worse), and how might they speak to us and to one another across centuries, genres, genders, and cultures?

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

To consume, digest, and excrete great writing in its many forms and genres

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: