Special Topics: Introduction to Literature
LIT 190S
LIT190S-01 Everyday Life
With Instructor Carson Welch
What is everyday life? What should everyday life be like? Or is day-to-day routine something to be escaped? Exploring the concept of everyday life in modern European literature and philosophy, this course asks how writers have taken the emergence of “everydayness” as a sign of both democratic progress and widespread dissatisfaction. The course surveys some of the ways in which the concept of everyday life has proven difficult to capture in traditional philosophical discourse and has motivated various kinds of literary experimentation. Readings span the themes of existentialism, alienation, psychoanalysis, feminism, and literary modernism.
Introduction to the study of literature and other forms of cultural expression, such as film. Different introductory approaches will be used in each section (for example, a systematic account of literary genres, a historical survey of ideas and forms of fiction, concepts of authorship and subjectivity, or of literary meaning and interpretation). More than one national literature or culture represented.
