LIT 2000 - Spring 2025 - Bliss

This introductory course focuses on the fundamentals of Western literature. We will study a range of authors and multiple genres, including novels, nonfiction essays, short stories, and poetry. In this class, we’ll think about how a literary canon is made and contested, and ask ourselves questions like “What separates regular books from Literature with a capital L?” Along the way we will build a “toolkit” of critical approaches and formal devices that help us to effectively read and think about complex texts. The Victorian period will provide some especially helpful case studies, since it was one of the first points in history where enough people could read that everyone, from the super-wealthy to the very poor, had their own taste in books and the types of stories they wanted to read. We’ll be reading a range of genres this semester, including sensationalist mysteries popular with the working-class and the more “refined” realist novels of the middle and upper classes. As we go, we’ll think about what it means for a text to be considered canonical “Literature,” and how defining that term helps us to think about probing questions in the nineteenth century and in our own time.