Instr:                Andrew  Kincaid
Office:              TBA
e-mail:              TBA
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:          TR   11:05-12:20    CRT 321

Course Description

Language, like any cultural object, once released into the world, takes on a life of its own, often mutating, parodying, and mimicking official ways of speaking and writing.  This class will explore some of the varied uses to which the English language has been put as it has travelled across the globe, taken root, and developed in cultures far away from its nominal home.  We will read works both in English and in translation, from a variety of cultures and time periods.  Our goal is to work out a comparative method for reading that shows how local and flexible literature is.  The course will also foreground the
question, What is literature?  Students will emerge from the class with a solid sense of the differences among various literary forms, and the cultural contexts from which they arise.  We are not only interested in reading, but we will concern ourselves with the question of how to read.  We will, therefore, investigate some of the principal developments in literary theory over the last century:  new criticism, structuralism, materialism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and so on, relating each to its own historical moment.