Schedule of readings:
I will usually be posting three lectures each week, as recordings on the Panopto page of the course Canvas site, at least a few days before the dates given below for the assigned readings. My assumption, and the assumption of your discussion section instructors, is that you will have done the readings and viewed the lectures by the dates given below (for instance, by Friday, March 29, you should have read chapter 1 of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and have viewed the recorded lecture on that chapter [lecture 3]).
Most assigned readings not included in the four books ordered for the class are available as pdf files on the “Files” page of the Canvas site for the class (see the left margin of the Canvas front page for the “Files” link). Alternately, some short works, especially poems, are available online, at the links in the schedule of readings below. Suggested readings are not required but are instead provided as extra reading on topics that will be touched on in lecture; I will usually refer to those readings in lecture, but I will not assume that students have read the suggested works, and you will not be tested on them.
Part 1. What is “Literature?”: National Vernaculars, the Printed Book, and Modern Culture
Week 1.
March 25: Introduction to the class
March 27: How to read Imagined Communities (no assigned reading)
March 29: Read: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 1 (pdf)
Week 2.
April 1: Read: Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 2 (pdf)
April 3: Read: Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 3 (pdf)
April 5: Read: Michael Warner, excerpt from Letters of the Republic (pages 122-138; pdf)
Week 3.
April 8: Read: Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” lines 1-42 and “Miller’s Tale” (lines 1-746), from The Canterbury Tales, available online at
http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm
(select “side-by-side translation” for Middle English original and modern translation)
April 10: Read: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (to the end of volume 1, chapter 5; page 64)
April 12: Read: Shelley, Frankenstein (to the end of volume 2, chapter 4; page 118)
Week 4.
April 15: Read: Shelley, Frankenstein (to the end of volume 3, chapter 3; page 178)
Suggested: Roger Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing” (pdf)
April 17: Shelley, Frankenstein (finish the novel; to the end of volume 3, chapter 7; page 225)
April 19: No class; midterms due, Friday, 4/19
Week 5. Part 2. What is “Literary Study?”: Theories of Language, Meaning, Reading, and Writing
April 22: Read: M.H. Abrams, “Introduction: Orientation of Critical Theories,” from The Mirror and the Lamp (pdf)
Read: Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” part II, lines 289-304 only, available online at https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/essay-criticism-part-2
Read: William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” available online at https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/i-wandered-lonely-cloud
April 24: Read: Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, chapter 1, “Traditional Criticism and Common Sense”
April 26: Read: Belsey, Critical Practice, “New Criticism” (pages 14-19)
Read: John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” available online at https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ode-grecian-urn
Week 6:
April 29: Read: Belsey, Critical Practice, “Reader Power” (pages 27-34)
Read: William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” available online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow
Read: Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B,” available online
at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/theme-for-english-b/
May 1: Read: Belsey, Critical Practice, “Post-Saussurean Linguistics” (pages 35-43) and “The Plurality of Meaning” (pages 48-51)
Read: Langston Hughes, "My People," available online at
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-people/
May 3: Read: Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (pdf)
Suggested: Darko Suvin, chapter 1 of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (pdf)
Suggested: Belsey, Critical Practice, “The Subject and the Text (pages 62-77)
Week 7.
May 6: Read: Belsey, Critical Practice, “Ideology,” “The Subject,” “Psychoanalysis,” “Resistance” (pages 52-59, in all) and “Sherlock Holmes” (pages 101-108)
Read: Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (pdf)
Part 3. Writable Texts and the Cultural Politics of Reading
May 8: Read: Belsey, Critical Practice, “Unfixing the Subject” (pages 83-85 only) and “Barthes and Macheray” (pages 95-101)
Read: Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis, “Murder the Husband, Murder the Story” (pdf)
Read: Langston Hughes, “As I Grew Older,” available online at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-i-grew-older/
May 10: Read: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (through page 38, Dewey Dell’s monologue)
Week 8:
May 13: Read: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (through page 73, Tull’s monologue)
May 15: Read: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (through page 114, Vardaman’s monologue)
May 17: Read: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (finish the novel, through page 149)
Week 9.
May 20: Read: Nisi Shawl, Everfair (through page 64, to the end of “Fifty Kilometers Out of Matadi, Congo, July 1894”)
Suggested: Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” pages 1-19, 29-40 (pdf)
May 22: Read: Shawl, Everfair (through page 136, to the end of “Kinshasa, Congo, October 1897”)
May 24: Read: Shawl, Everfair (through page 198, the end of Part One)
Week 10.
May 27: No class; Memorial Day holiday
May 29: Read: Shawl, Everfair (through page 325, to the end of “Kisangani to Kalemie, Everfair, February 1918”)
Suggested: Henry Jenkins, “How Texts Become Real” (pdf)
May 31: Read: Shawl, Everfair (finish the novel)
Final exams due, Monday, June 3