Literature Seminar for Freshmen

With the rise of "Bookstagrammers" and Tik Tok's "Book Girlies," today binge reading is often seen as a badge of honor, identifying only the most dedicated and passionate of readers. This, however, was not always the case. Such voracious reading was once considered a dangerous form of consumption, leading to addiction, contagion, and corruption - especially for female readers. This course will trace a history of such infectious reading, beginning in the eighteenth century, and investigate why some of the past's most pathologized novels were also named its most feminine ones. We will explore what makes a novel addictive, why women were believed so susceptible to these novels' influence, and what stories of repression and resistance may be hiding behind women's literary "guilty pleasures." In doing so, we will reflect on the act of reading itself, exploring different ways for critically engaging with a text and asking how reading continues to inform our understanding of gender in the modern day. We will read works by Richard B. Sheridan, Anne Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Ruskin, and Margaret Oliphant as well as works by contemporary feminist and affect theorists such as Rita Felski, Tara MacDonald, Sianne Ngai, and Sara Ahmed to better understand how the long 19th century's novel debates continues to inform how we read and relate to novels in our own lives. Each unit of this course will be centered around a different genre that has historically been maligned for its dangerous influence over women, including the sentimental romance, gothic fiction, and sensation fiction. In the final unit, we will look at contemporary forms of obsessive reading, such as the rise of fandom culture. This course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.

Course Attributes: EN H; FYS; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Literature Seminar for Freshmen

ENGLISH LITERATURE 156

Section 01