Literary value and 100 years of American literature

In this course, students read 20th-century American literature and discuss it in relation to various aspects of literary value. These aspects include, on the one hand, key issues in literary studies such as high/low culture, highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow literature, the canon and the bestseller, tradition and experiment, convention and innovation, compliance and controversy, genius and celebrity, and, on the other, the literary properties and affordances of particular texts that can be seen as valuable in relation to historical and cultural contexts. What types of value does a literary text offer? Aesthetic value? Knowledge value? Emotional value? Social value? Economic value? Throughout the course, there is movement and interplay between theories of literary value, twentieth-century literary history, and specific literary texts. Instruction is in the form of seminars, for which students complete reading and writing assignments. Some texts are read by all students in preparation for seminars, and other relevant texts are selected by the students for their written and oral assignments. The course requires students to participate actively in seminars, which sometimes means mandatory oral presentations.