General Literature

During the first term, the General Literature course will serve both as an introduction to the reading of literary texts and as a historical overview of Western literature, ranging from Homer to Kathy Acker, including Sophocles, Hadewijch, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Woolf, Aimé Césaire, Toni Morrison and LGBTQ hip hop texts (Frank Ocean, Meryl, etc.).

Course objectives and methodology:

-To develop students' ability to analyze short excerpts from literary texts. Each week, they will be asked to read a ten- to fifteen-page excerpt by a given author, one or more paragraphs of which will be analyzed together in class (close reading).

-Share with students fundamental literary references from the Western tradition, necessary for identifying and understanding frequent themes in the history of art or thought (e.g. the Oedipus myth, Dante's dark forest, Don Quixote's windmills, the chambre à soi, etc.).

-Develop their sense of history and the evolution of ideas: for example, we'll look at epic poetry and its underlying relationship to the world, the reasons behind the birth of the novel, the characteristics of Romanticism, hip hop, etc.

Assessment:

Written or oral exam, including questions on content (e.g., "name three characteristics of negritude"), analysis (analysis of a paragraph, whether seen in class or not) and personal interest ("choose a text seen in class and relate it to your own work").