This class serves as an introduction to the study of English. Throughout the course of the semester students will be introduced to a host of literary criticism ranging from Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Henry Gates, Toni Morrison , and Nguigi wa Thiong’o. The theoretical section of this class will, ideally, provide students with the background concerning the ethics, the nature, the ontology, and the purpose of writing and literature. In this class we will investigate literary relationships by attempting to chart a trajectory in regards to how literature moves and advances itself. To that end, we will be primarily concerned with what we can call “literary debts” and “revisions.” So, we question, for example: how does the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe ultimately revise Joseph Conrad? How does Aime Cesaire rewrite Shakespheare’s The Tempest? Were modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S Eliot inspired by Black speech and writing?
Required Texts
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart
Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest
Figiel, Sia. Where we once Belonged
Howarth, Peter. The Cambridge Introduction of Modernist Poetry
Ama Ata Aidoo Our Sister Killjoy