ENGL 105 - Literature X

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This is a new, team-taught introductory course that provides a 100-level English option for both non-majors and majors that showcases the power of literary and cultural study. It demonstrates in practice why historical literary and cultural contexts are crucial elements for understanding contemporary texts and the questions they care about. Through a team-teaching model, it shows students how the expertise of faculty members across the department speaks to each other’s chosen canons and questions. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Topic for 2024/25b: Passing. This course focuses on “passing” and performance, considering this theme primarily in relation to gender, and also to race. As a team-taught course with an interactive lecture component, it combines three professors’ expertise on Shakespeare and performance theory, gender diversity in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and popular writing by nineteenth-century women. The syllabus spans different literary traditions and media, from crossdressing actors in Shakespeare’s time, to eighteenth-century “female husbands,” to the pseudonymous personas of women authors. Theorizing how to “do” the history of gender and sexuality—and looking at how that question shifts as we consider additional forms of embodied difference, such as race—is a primary task motivating the course. The course brings the instructors’ research interests into conversation in a way that productively crosses the boundaries of time period and national tradition. Katie Gemmill, Zoltán Márkus, and Blevin Shelnutt.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS