COMP 401
Senior Seminar: Histories of Reading Fall 2015
Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed ENGL 452
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This course examines practices of and ideas about reading as they developed in different historical and cultural contexts over the last three thousand years. Our approach will be both historical and comparative: we will investigate how modes and theories of reading changed over time, paying particular attention to how material and intellectual contexts impacted reading in different societies. We will also consider how different written scripts (including alphabetic and logographic) and textual formats (from the scroll to the screen) have influenced and been influenced by reading practices. One important focus of the course will be how reading practices and technologies have moved between cultures and functioned differently within those cultures. This course will also investigate how theories of reading–be they moral, aesthetic, practical, or scientific–have developed and interacted with each other. Specific topics may include the following: standards of literacy; the neurology of reading; the development of silent reading; reading for pleasure; the intersection of the oral and the written; religious reading; the impact of print; and the role of reading and literacy in the creation and maintenance of social, political, and economic power. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course undertakes the comparative study of different societies and also different time periods and groups within societies.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 17
Expected: 15
Class#: 1423
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, final research paper
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: one 300- or 400-level course in literature or permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: senior Comparative Literature majors
Distributions: Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 401 Division I ENGL 452 Division I

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