ENGL 352
Digging in the Crates: Making and Unmaking Literary Tradition Spring 2021
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed ENGL 352 / AFR 353

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on matters of style in literature, art, and music in order to explore and subsequently reimagine how relationships between texts form literary traditions. Instead of assuming what a literary tradition is, and without prioritizing a teleological chronology of literary influence as literary traditions tend to do, we will study work ranging from antiquity to the present, anachronistically and in tandem, in order to better understand how the past speaks to the present and how the present speaks to the past. As a general, if imperfect, rule of thumb we will be working regularly with pairs of texts, one from prior to 1800 and another from after 1800: for example, a Toni Morrison novel with a Homeric epic, the work of Jamaica Kincaid with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the poetry of John Donne with the lyrics of the Wu Tang Clan.