Literature

Degree:
B.A.
Division:
Humanities
Program Options:
Area of Concentration, Joint Concentration, Secondary Field

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

Twentieth Century British and American Drama: Realism and Its Discontents

LITR 2855
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
  • Literary Movements of 19th Century France
  • Modern & Contemporary Chinese Literature
  • Short Story Workshop
  • Performing Gender, Class and Identity in Early Modern Drama
  • Race, Writing and World Making: An Introduction to African American Literature
  • Reading Poetry
  • Straying from the Path: Red Riding Hood in Text and Film
  • Twentieth-Century British and American Drama: Realism and Its Discontents

Career Pathways

  • ESOL Teacher
  • Attorney & Public Defender
  • Library Sciences
  • Journalism
  • Publishing
  • Web Development
  • Entrepreneur in Translation Services

Contact Us

Humanities Division

Contact
Phone Number
(941) 487 - 4360
Email Address
[email protected]
Location
Office
Ace 116

Literature Faculty