As speakers of English, we should all (in theory) feel curious about
the behavior of our language in its native habitat—the southern part of
the island of Britain, a.k.a. England.
In this class, we investigate important books from several historical periods, ranging
from the lyric poets of Shakespeare’s time (and their even older
reading matter) to the successful living playwright Michael Frayn.
One aim, clearly, is to study literary genres on a high level.
More deeply, you'll learn the basic habits of thinking like a literary
critic, which will place you in a position to write original, complex,
well-documented essays.
Our readings will cover an imposingly large sweep of time and literary innovation.
So to focus our inquiries as the class unfolds, I propose that we
concentrate on the idea of the game.
That implies a number of ideas, potentially.
It seems quite
straightforward to say that characters in a novel or a dialogue are
often playing games, either literally or figuratively. But might we
also say that literary authors are playing games with their
predecessors, or playing games with their readers? Who makes the rules?
Is a book a game? (If not, what is?) Is a reader a player, and
would it make sense to speak about rules that a reader can follow or
break?
The questions could
go on, and no doubt you can think of more.
But in short, we can think
of the game as a theme and as a formal structure we can discover in
widely diverse texts. And we can think of it further as a heuristic,
helping us to reflect about how literature and literary culture work.
Like any analytical tool, this one will need periodic evaluation
by us: does the notion of the game help us discover anything we
wouldn’t have figured out by other means?