Department of English

From novels like Vladimir (2022) and Life is Everywhere (2023) to TV shows like The Chair (2021) and Lucky Hank (2023), representations of college life have become especially interested in literature students as of late, even though literary study catches a lot of flack within popular culture more generally. This One Series course will consider the cultural significance of literary study to the present by surveying the evolving role that literature students have played in campus novels from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)—a novel about an adjunct lecturer in English whose dwindling job opportunities coincides with a miscarriage—will be our end-point, and we’ll work our way there by reading some important interlocutors in this field, like John Williams’ Stoner (1965), Mary McCarthy's Birds of America (1971), Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), Jefferey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011), and Caleb Crain’s Overthrow (2019). We’ll also contextualize our readings with important work from the field of critical university studies and with archival research in Penn’s Curricular Collection, which contains student notes and teaching papers from Penn English classrooms over the past hundred years. By the end of the semester, students can expect to emerge with in-depth knowledge about literary studies as a discipline as well as its significance within narratives and debates about university life. Assignments will include brief research exercises and short writing in various forms; for the final projects, students will have the choice of a critical essay or creative project.