Topic: Minor Genres with Major Impact

Catalog description

This course examines five minor genres from a wide variety of historical time periods in order to consider the context that creates and propagates a short-lived but impactful subgenre. In this class, students will read, write, and analyze some of the works that comprise the five genres and explore generic implications. Since every piece of writing is influenced by the context in which it is written, we will spend a significant amount of time considering the historical, biographical, socio-political, and cultural context that help to produce each literary work as well as our own understanding of the material. Class discussions will be framed by some of the following questions: what attracts one to write within a particular subgenre? What might be some reasons for pursuing genres that are new to a time period? What choices does one necessarily need to make when writing within a specific genre? And finally, what do these choices show us (the readers) about the text, the context, and our own perceptions of the two? This course sharpens students’ ability to think critically about texts that reflect viewpoints from a wide variety of time periods and locations, and therefore better understand the complexities of their own environments.