Literary Genres and Precedents

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the fundamental generic conventions of the British and American traditions by analyzing their most resonant Classical and Eurasian influences and interlocutors. In doing so, the course also introduces the categories of formal textual analysis and interpretation—diction, syntax, trope, theme, genre, narrative, and meter. Students will read diverse, historically significant texts (all in English translation) including epic, drama (tragedy, comedy, realism), mythology, romance, fiction (romantic, realist, modernist), prose (autobiography, essay, manifesto, critique), and an array of lyric modes. While we will strive to engage these texts in all the complexity of their contexts and content, our focus will be on the particular formal conventions that these texts established, transformed, or otherwise modeled for Anglo-American writers.