CSCL3117: Concepts of Literary Study

This course begins by asking what this strange thing we call literature is, this six-thousand year old form of writing that brings into existence, each time a work is read, a world that did not previously exist. Sometimes that world is one in which we long to live, sometimes it is dark and foreboding, all death and despair; sometimes we seek it out as an escape from our daily lives, sometimes we enter it to be able to better understand those same lives, to come back to them refreshed, not just emotionally but intellectually -- for if literature does involve an immersion in the not-actually-existent, a departure from the everyday world, it does so by engaging us from within the world and in such a way that it is able to recast our everyday world and make us think it in new ways. And literature does all this with that most everyday of things, language. By attending to the ways authors and scholars mobilise language’s expressive, analytic and conceptual resources, with this course we shall learn various methods of critically appreciating and engaging complex literature, while gaining insight into how the practices of literary criticism and theory relate to, and help us understand, the world in which we live, how language shapes and forms that world and literature’s unique place and role in that world and its forming.

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