ENG 212 - Self and Society

Students will be introduced to the broad outlines of the English literary tradition through an encounter with texts drawn from multiple periods of English literary history, as well as being exposed to the dialogue between the Western and non-Western literary traditions. Literature is a special form this conversation takes: poems, narrative prose, and drama stories provide unique affective, experiential, and cognitive modes of understanding which shape how we understand the application of this conversation to contemporary life. In this course, we will explore different kinds of relations between the self and society, such as between the self and family, self and community, and self and the nation. We will examine how these texts raise questions about the self’s relation to society as a social convention, about the way individuals resist or adopt those social conventions, about our identities as raced, gendered, and embodied beings.
Lecture
Credits: 3
Core Course
Offered in Fall & Spring