[To view first day PowerPoint on the course structure click the following link: Great Works course structure].
Required texts*
Black Shack Alley (1950) by Joseph Zobel
A Lesson Before Dying (1993) by Earnest Gaines
Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) by J.K. Rowling
* Some older texts are out of copyright and an electronic version is easily accessed online. All additional readings mentioned in the syllabus will be either handouts or available through wordpress, e-res, or blackboard.
Course Description
This is a Great Works course (English 2850). The purpose of Great Works courses is to introduce students to literary studies and critical and culturally engaged thinking by way of exposing students to a variety of literary texts from a variety of regions and over an expanse of time. Many Great Works courses focus on a theme. In this class we will be looking at School and Education in Literature.
In particularly we will look at a variety of texts that explore the relationship between education, school, and the making of MAN. We will begin with philosophy texts associated with the enlightenment. The purpose is not only to expose you to the rhetoric and thinking of these philosophers but also for you to have a historical understanding of where certain ideas that seem natural to the western world about (ie. standing on one’s own two feet, self reasoning, self made, rational man etc.) have a sort of origins point in enlightenment philosophers break from notions of a divine creature and the church as the horizons of the world.
Often especially in America (where our declaration of independence and much of our constitution is influenced by some of these philosophers) we hail enlightenment as the beginning of a free modern age where all men are created equal. We celebrate the freedom of all men (remembering that we mean a more humanity and not a gendered male), but these enlightenment thoughts as much as they did highlight notions of equality between all men had very selective construction of who/what constitutes a man (and most certainly women were not a part of it). Enlightenment thinking helped fuel advances in technology, medicine, and art that we take for granted, but it also initiated and built itself on the backs of Middle Passage slave trade, colonialism, and the systematic denial of humanity and life to most of the world’s human possibility (to say nothing of enlightenment notions of conquering and developing nature).