LIT 3124 Summer 2023 Niekamp

This course will explore British, U.S., and other Anglophone literature, media, and culture from the Romantic period (c.1800) to the present. As such, we will acquire a working knowledge of the major styles, movements, and events of the past two-hundred years. But this is not your typical survey class. Instead of approaching our course texts chronologically or speed-reading as many “classics” as time permits, we will structure our semester around different ways that texts have attempted to document, respond to, or inspire political and cultural change. Beginning with excerpts from J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, we will frame our discussions this semester around the notion that texts perform functions or acts. How do texts make or dialogue with history? How do writers self-fashion within particular cultural contexts? How do we, as twenty-first-century readers, engage with historical archives while acknowledging their omissions? Expect to close-read and to work within multiple genres, including poetry, essays, novels, film, and more. Authors we will read include (but are not limited to) Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Charles Alexander Eastman, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Rigoberto González, and Claudia Rankine.

This course fulfills an LMC core requirement.