L213 16011 LITERARY MASTERPIECES
Michael Adams

2:30p-3:45p TR (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

This course will consider literary representation of all sorts of family relations, especially sibling relations. The works we will share are rich, varied, and culturally significant, so we won’t restrict ourselves to discussing the family, but that will be the recurring motif of our discussions. Each work configures the family in unexpected ways, ways that invite us to reflect on our own experience, question our expectations and ideals, and consider critically the role of family in our lives and our roles in the families (legally defined as such or invented by us) that partially define, enable, elevate, and entertain us. Our texts will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market,” Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides; others I have in mind include the Antigone of Euripedes, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but obviously we can’t read all of these. If you are thinking of taking the course and want to talk about it with me ahead of time, your interests could influence the final syllabus. Students will write three 6-8 page essays (each in two drafts) and a final examination.