English 190

Research Seminar: In Defense of Literature

Other Readings and Media

Babbitt, Irving: Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities; Du Bois, W .E. B.: The Souls of Black Folk; Stephenson, Neal: Snow Crash; Mullen, Haryette: Sleeping with the Dictionary; Ohmann, Richard: The Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture; Sontag, Susan: Against Interpretation; Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Sapphire: Push; Berry, Wendell: A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural; Hamid, Mohsin: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Description

This course addresses the so-called “crisis in the humanities” by examining the history of this perceived crisis and its relationship to the formation of the field of literary studies. Can we still find solutions to our problems in literature or is literature made obsolete by the popularization of alternative methods of communication: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.? We will examine the arguments within literary humanism, the novel’s relationship to self-formation and the notion of art as redemptive, alongside an examination of the institutionalization of literary studies. In the face of institutional and cultural crisis where literature is no longer viewed as capable of helping us deal with the contemporary problems of life, and is sometimes imagined as the cause of its problems (English teachers breeding anti-American ideas), how do we, as Gregory Jusdanis argues, fashion a new “defense of literature”?

Reader will include pieces by John Leo, John Dewey, Amy Tan, Michael Berubé, Carey Nelson, John Guillory, Marjorie Perloff, and Stanley Fish.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in, or wait-listing for, this course.

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