Intro to Literature

If you enrolled in this course, you probably agree that reading literature is important. But why? What even is literature? We are often told that literature is a vehicle for symbols or “deeper meanings.” Is the point of literature to show a one-to-one relationship between fiction and reality? If so, then artworks are totally inefficient ways to communicate that meaning. Why not just say what you mean? Literature and other cultural “texts” are counterintuitive, slow, obtuse, ambiguous, polyvocal, moody, excessive, spare, contradictory—inefficient.

Literature and culture’s inefficiency is also why reading can be such a distinct pleasure. The process of interpreting literature does not end when you’ve found the “correct” meaning. Rather, the value of reading literature is in the process of dialoging with a text and the ideas that can arise not just in a text but from the process of that dialogue. Active participation makes literature unlike other forms of instrumental communication that we use daily. This participation is also profoundly social. It allows us to represent and narrate, and therefore make thinkable, the concepts and relationships that structure and regulate our experiences of the world. Relying on a small selection of influential texts—canonical, popular, and theoretical—this class will discuss how and why literature, culture, and art allow us to parse social experience, unveil assumptions we hold about our society, posit ideas that might be otherwise inexpressible, and reflect upon our individual and collective values and subjectivities.