Concentration Literature, Modernity, and the Contemporary

This concentration provides a dual framework for considering the history of literature: the study of texts’ singular or innovative relation to the past—a measure of their modernity—as well as the exploration of their complex, sometimes contentious, relation to other discourses of the same historical moment—a measure of their contemporaneity. This double perspective can apply to Europe even before the advent of the so-called “early modern” period during the Renaissance, charting a history of various modernities or modernisms, but it can also serve as the occasion to investigate the limits of considering any literature “modern” or “contemporaneous.” This concentration includes a broad range of courses investigating problems of periodization or genre, questions about aesthetics or creativity, and issues concerning literary form, the history of authorship and readership, and the teaching of literature.

Faculty researching and teaching in this concentration:

Examples of courses taught in this concentration:   

• 18th-Century British Literature and Institutions of Enlightenment: Race/Writing/War
• Fictional License: Imaginative Narrative in Victorian Law; Legal Stories in Victorian Fiction
• The Ethics of Leaving in American Literature: Emerson and Thoreau
• Modernist American Lyric and Theories of the Subject

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