ENGL 6741 - Sustainable Forms

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

C. Levine.

This course explores questions of politics and literary studies in an unusual way. We will experiment with turning away from moments of disruption, innovation, and exception to take up the problem of sustainability—how to keep social worlds going over time. This will involve thinking about literary and social forms that have not been traditionally valued in our field, such as routine, shelter, and infrastructure. We will focus on nineteenth-century and contemporary realism to ask how some traditional realist techniques give us ways of thinking about the sustaining of collective life over time. We will ask about how we might create a canon of sustainability, and we will read a range of theorists, including Susan Fraiman, everyday life studies, Birmingham cultural studies, recent work in queer antinormativity, and ecocriticism.