ENL 2022 Survey of English Literature: 1750 to the Present
Section: 8049
Class Meetings: MWF 8 (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays 3:00-3:50 PM)
Location: MAT 0051 (Matherly Hall)
Syllabus: Click here to view/download
The British Canon in the Digital Archive
Human beings have been collecting and preserving documents and artifacts for thousands of years. The materials that each culture maintains determine how future generations and other cultures understand their way of life. Archives—libraries, museums, and other collections of documents—store a selection of such materials, determining how we access and interpret the past. Whoever controls the Archive controls history. Today, anyone with a reliable Internet connection can access scans and photographs of materials from archives all over the world, enabling us to engage with literature in ways that were not possible until very recently. With more literary materials being added to digital archives daily, there has never been a greater opportunity to see how works of literature were first published, and to study the contexts in which they were first read.
In this course, we will read a selection of novels, novellas, poetry, and short fiction written by authors from the British Isles (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) after 1750. Our challenge will be to only access these materials in digital archives. Whenever possible, we will read these texts as scans of first editions or early printings, or other formats that are available online. We will use archive theory and discussions of printing formats and technologies to chart a path through several centuries of British literary culture. Students will engage with British literature from this time period and its relationship to archives through in-class exercises and writing assignments, including a midterm paper and final paper with drafts and peer review for each, and four short response posts.
This course confers CLAS General Education credit for either Composition (C) or Humanities (H), as well as 6,000 of UF’s 24,000-word writing requirement (WR).
