As a core requirement for the English major, this course introduces students to myriad ways of thinking about literature, as well as various methods, approaches, and skills for writing about literature in an incisive, thoughtful style. Throughout the semester, we will read works from across periods and genres, explore different things readers do with texts, and practice ways of responding to literature in short writing, discussion, close reading, argumentation, research papers, and more. By the end of the semester, students will find themselves writing more deftly and thinking more robustly about literature and how we relate to it.

The theme for this section of 2100, “Forever Young,” brings us into contact with a generative literary and mythological topic: the desire to stave off death and live forever. How have writers across periods thought about the possibility of extending life, and how do we (in an age of tech bros with blood boys and dreams of the singularity) deal with our own aging bodies? We will read, among others, Alfred Tennyson, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jordan Peele.