ClassInfo

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

Humor is not typically acknowledged as an art form equivalent to drama in contemporary American society. When we want to be entertained we watch a comedy, but when we want to think deeply about something we turn to drama. However, humorous works, and more specifically literature and popular culture, have a profound capacity to encourage social change. This course proposes to examine how humor - and especially irony, satire, and parody - both entertains us and leads us, as readers/viewers, to improve the society in which we live. With a special focus on American satire and irony, we investigate how satirical expressions can interrogate cultural values, challenge authorities, and empower. Possible novels include works by Joseph Heller, Paul Beatty, Margaret Atwood, and others; essays, films, blogs, parody social media accounts, and other artifacts will also be considered.

This section of Literature and Public Life will be organized around the question of what, if anything, literature can do to alleviate suffering in our society. Does reading about fictional people make us more empathetic and thus more likely to support reforms to aid real people? Do literature's imaginative worlds provide models of a better, more humane civilization? Does the critical attention literary texts require from their readers make us more intelligent political and social observers? On other hand: Is reading literature mere escapism or connoisseurship that dulls the social conscience? Does the emotion provoked by art distract us from the cold, rational, systemic thinking needed to organize or re-organize society? Are we attacking the freedom of the imagination or of the individual when we ask writers and artists to be accountable to the public? We will attempt to answer these difficult questions about the relationship of literature to public life by reading a selection of major twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that address themselves, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, to the question of the writer's and the reader's responsibilities when faced with war, genocide, poverty, totalitarianism, sexual violence, mental illness, racism, and other social ills. We will likely read novels by Herman Melville Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro and a selection of critical essays. A service-learning option (alongside other written assignments in this writing-intensive course) will help us to describe and evaluate the relationship between our fictional and non-fictional lives.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

This section of Literature and Public Life will be organized around the question of what, if anything, literature can do to alleviate suffering in our society. Does reading about fictional people make us more empathetic and thus more likely to support reforms to aid real people? Do literature's imaginative worlds provide models of a better, more humane civilization? Does the critical attention literary texts require from their readers make us more intelligent political and social observers? On other hand: Is reading literature mere escapism or connoisseurship that dulls the social conscience? Does the emotion provoked by art distract us from the cold, rational, systemic thinking needed to organize or re-organize society? Are we attacking the freedom of the imagination or of the individual when we ask writers and artists to be accountable to the public? We will attempt to answer these difficult questions about the relationship of literature to public life by reading a selection of major twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that address themselves, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, to the question of the writer's and the reader's responsibilities when faced with war, genocide, poverty, totalitarianism, sexual violence, mental illness, racism, and other social ills. We will likely read novels by Herman Melville Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro and a selection of critical essays. A service-learning option (alongside other written assignments in this writing-intensive course) will help us to describe and evaluate the relationship between our fictional and non-fictional lives.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.

Meaning/practice of citizenship. Historical themes, contemporary issues in American public life: access of citizenship, tensions between social duties and individual freedoms, role of moral values in public life. Diverse literary materials. Optional service-learning component.