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. Hiram Perez, Blevin Shelnutt, Pasquale Toscano.

Topic for 2025/26b: Embodiment. At once a collaboration, experiment, and journey of transnational breadth, Literature X focuses on embodiment in relation to gender, race, disability, and labor while offering students a panoramic view of literary study at the college level. As a team-taught course with interactive lecture and seminar components, it combines three professors’ expertise on the changing conceptions—and representations—of othered body-minds in a variety of interrelated contexts: from the formation of the English canon in the age of Shakespeare and Milton to the rise of bestselling women authors in the nineteenth century to the incredible innovations of writers of color in the twentieth, erupting first in the Harlem Renaissance and then persisting to the present. This is to say that the syllabus crosses different literary traditions and media—hence, the X of our title—to explore how concerns of corporeality are culturally ubiquitous. They animate some of the most often celebrated texts in English; underpin nascent categories of difference in an increasingly “modern” world; and intersect with longstanding theories about literary art and authorship, which often leave little room for the author’s body. Our task at the heart of the course is therefore twofold. We not only theorize how to “do” the history of race, gender, class, and disability but hone a literary critical technique that accounts for formal, rhetorical, and intertextual complexity alongside these experiences of alterity. Even as our aims bring the instructors’ research interests into generative conversation, however, they also open a space for students to bring concerns, questions, and observations of their own to the table throughout our semester of chiasmic collaboration.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS