LIT 2010 - Spring 2026 - Wonder

LIT 2010 is an introductory literature course designed to enrich students’ skills in both literary criticism and craft analysis. We will read and discuss and broad range of fiction, focusing on forms such as the novel, short story, and flash/micro-fiction. We will cover a brief historical view to establish a landscape of contemporary fiction’s inherited techniques and themes in the first half of the class and then we will shift our focus to the contemporary American fiction for the second half. This class will examine fiction writing through the lens of craft and literary theory, as well as historical and social contexts. You will be asked to engage in discussions in each class, offering your own questions or insights into the what the story does well, what its shortcomings are, and what challenges the story answers to context of the society and time in which it was written. You will develop skills to read for craft analysis, and there will be opportunities to write fiction as a part of some class assignments, as well as your final project. There is also ample opportunity to engage in research or critical theory if that is a skill you are interested in honing. Practically speaking, we will work at the intersection of craft and literary criticism, seeking to discover how these two approaches to text inform each other and create friction in the literary landscape.