LIT 2010 Summer 2024 - Biagi

This introductory course focuses on novels of literary fantasy; specifically, novels of folklore, monsters, vampires, deathless men, death herself, magical realism, allegory, literary retellings, alternative societies, and more. Alongside our four primary novels, we will view short films, TV episodes, short stories, and other supplementary texts in class to broaden our discussions. Our goal will be to learn how to interpret fiction through several different lenses: craft analyses, literary analyses, and sociocultural analyses. In the process, we will become better acquainted with how fiction writers accomplish what they do through craft techniques like characterization, point of view, setting, plot, style, tone, and voice. We will become adept at close reading literary passages. We will analyze the ways authors incorporate race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, identity, and community into their fiction. And we will explore how literary fantasy reveals ourselves as humans and the world around us in unique ways that contemporary realism and other genres cannot. We’ll start by reading The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht, then continue with Pym by Mat Johnson, Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, and Death with Interruptions by José Saramago.

This course satisfies the understanding genres distribution elective.