LIT 4013.001 Fall 2023 Kilgore

Here’s your chance to spend a semester with two of the most iconic novels + vast symbolic prose poems + philosophical essays + social critiques in the American tradition—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Reading these two radical narrative epics (and their unforgettable narrators) face to face, this class will primarily explore Melville and Ellison’s different historical moments, highlighting how they each represent the politics of American culture and nationalism, white supremacy and racial capitalism, industrial labor and institutional power. We will also dig into source materials and learn about the artistic and intellectual contexts necessary to fully appreciate these two fictional masterpieces.

This course meets the “understanding genres” requirement