Literature

The Literature AOC combines literature from diverse cultures across languages and genres. Students read widely, from Homer, Shakespeare, and Austen to Dostoevsky, Proust, García Márquez, Adichie, Castellanos, Mackey, and Yu Hua to explore literary expression across linguistic, national, and historic boundaries.

About the Literature Area of Concentration

Literature students pursue a wide variety of topics through both formal courses and collaboratively designed tutorials. Some Literature students want to dig deeply into Latin American novels or French fin-de-siècle fiction. Still others want to explore Chinese film, American experimental poetics, German bourgeois dramas or philosophical Russian novels. Whatever your interest, you will work side by side with faculty members in our Languages and Literatures programs. You’ll also have the opportunity to explore a broad range of approaches, applying your analytic skills to written texts, performance, film, visual and digital media, and beyond. Working with faculty from all of our language and literature programs (Classics, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish), you will sharpen your analytical skills through close reading and in-depth discussions of texts and gain a deeper understanding and empathy for people from different backgrounds and traditions. And because the study of culture and language go hand in hand, the Literature AOC is also a good gateway to traveling, studying, and working abroad.

Featured Course

LITR 2855

Twentieth Century British and American Drama: Realism and Its Discontents

This course will survey the major trends in British and American drama in the twentieth and twenty first century, exploring the ways the theater in both countries worked with and against the conventions of both naturalistic drama and the utterly artificial well-made play. The drama of the last century is enormously varied in the issues it addresses, the types of characters it presents on the stage, the techniques it uses to do so, and the audiences it envisions. This variety reflects the consistent interest in the drama of the last hundred years in how people see the world around them, and how these ways of seeing can be changed.

Literature Curriculum

Recent courses

Black Mountain and New York School Poetry
Electronic Literature: Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
Literary Theory: Slavic and East European Approaches
Fantasy in Russia and Germany: Intercultural Dialogues
Greek and Roman Lyric Poetry
How a Woman Becomes a Lake and Other Unheroic Acts: A Craft Seminar in Gender and Genre Bending
Law & Literature: Narrative and Rhetoric in Action