LIT 4013 Kilgore Spring 2021

This course will provide students the opportunity to closely read several classic novels in English which broke new ground in experimenting with first-person narrative form. The list might change slightly but as of now I aim for us to take a serious look at Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992). Our focus will be on the self as voice as novel and the novel as voice as self, the compositional design of the narrator’s world building and self-representation, and the relationship between novelistic style and poetic/lyrical subjectivity. We will also contextualize the novels historically and in terms of genre, while also putting each work into critical conversation around the politics of narrative and nation, race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity formations.