English 20: Literary Forms, Fall 2024

Class Times: Monday & Wednesday, noon-1:15 PM

Section Times: TBA

Room: TBA

Instructor: Christopher Pexa [he/him], Barker Center 263, cpexa@fas.harvard.edu 

Teaching Fellow: TBA 

Office Hours: Pexa: M 11:00 AM-noon, W 11:00 AM-noon or by appointment

TF: by appointment

COURSE OVERVIEW

Description

This foundational course for English concentrators examines literary form and genre. We explore some of the many kinds of literature as they have changed over time, along with the shapes and forms that writers create, critics describe, and readers learn to recognize. The body of the course looks to the great literary types, or modes, such as epic, tragedy, and lyric, as well as to the workings of literary style in moments of historical change, producing the transformation, recycling, and sometimes the mocking of past forms. While each version of English 20 includes different texts from multiple periods, those texts always include five major works from across literary history: presently Beowulf, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. The course integrates creative writing with critical attention: assignments take creative as well as expository and analytical forms.

Like others, aspects of this version of the course reflect the interests and expertise of the instructors. In terms of presentation, this means that we’ll be thinking carefully about basic questions like “what is the ‘literary’?” “Where do the central ways of understanding the ‘literary’ in the English-speaking world come from?” and “What work does ‘literature’ in its different ‘forms’ do for us as individuals and members of society?” But we will re-frame these questions specifically in relation to Native American and Indigenous literatures (written in or translated into English), asking how Indigenous authors have adopted, replied to, modified, or simply refused non-Indigenous literary genres in order to express diverse, rich, and (often colonially-)complicated experiences.

Possible additional readings to include:

- Charles Eastman, Soul of the Indian

- Louise Erdrich, Four Souls

- Kent Monkman, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island

- Lynn Riggs, The Cherokee Night

- Joshua Whitehead, Johnny Appleseed