Welcome!

We live in an age of categorization, one which imagines that connecting a piece of writing to its proper imagined audience is essential, whether one is an educator or a publicist. The history of literature, it seems, has always had its categories, both formal (fiction, poetry, drama) and generic (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories). And, for each of these genres, there’s a presumed audience, as the forms and subjects of written matter follow their readers from a baby’s first board-book on through every stage of life and human interests, on up to the scuffed hardcovers scattered on table-tops in an assisted-living facility.

The genres of literature often take on the added purpose both of representing these varied stages in our reading, and catering to them. Children are supposed to read fairy-tales and books of wonder; teenagers crave adventure and romance, while young adults may seek solace for their sense of alienation. In the robust middle of life, our shared social reality and the issues of the day can predominate, along with the challenges of pursuing a career and balancing a budget. In later years, reflections – both bitter and sweet – loom suddenly larger, and at the end of (or, in some writings, after) life, we go to our graves with scores unsettled.

 

This course will take us through several of these “ages” of literature: for childhood, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen; for coming-of-age, the wild adventures of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, along with the fearful fundamentalism of the mother in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In young adulthood, we’ll wander the streets of Dublin with Catriona Lally, seeking signs of entrances to the otherworld. For mid-life, we’ll explore social realism and life’s struggles with Upton Sinclair’s muckraking classic The Jungle, followed by Colson Whitehead’s vibrant Harlem Shuffle. For old age, we’ll have the good company of Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his older years, which in their turn spurred some of the wry essays of Joan Didion. In the end, we’ll join in the ghostly colloquies from a country churchyard and a sleeping populace in Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood.

 

Throughout our journey, like all good adventurers, we’ll be asking questions, beginning with the most fundamental: what is “literature,” anyway? Why is it supposed to be “good” for us? And what difference does it make when the voices who speak come from experiences and times different from our own, whether in nation (Nigeria, England, Ireland, Wales), cultural identity (gay, Black, working-class, evangelical), gender or age. Is there more strength to be gained by reading of experiences like our own, or those of others? Does identity confer authority upon the author? And are those fairy-tales really for children, after all? And what does the purported genre of a book – fantasy, folktale, semi-autobiographical novel, poem, or play – tell us about how we might read it, or (perhaps) read against its form?