LIT 316/WGS 376 Global Women Writers
Course Meetings will be in the Blended Learning Format. We’ll meet on Monday, January 5th, Tuesdays January 6,13, and 20 and Thursdays, January 8, 15, and 22 for the synchronous, on-line classes, and will have synchronous meetings on Friday 1/6 and 1/13. The rest of the course work will be asynchronous. January 5-23.
This course offers a global study of literary narratives of contemporary womanhood. Our objective is to explore various literatures from around the world, and to examine the larger contexts, such as culture, nation, historical struggle, and global stage, in which such narratives are embedded and through which they emerge. We will read recent novels, essays, and a few poems and short stories from around the globe, focusing on non-Western literatures in particular. Our course texts include a wide range of genres including fantasy, historical realism, magical realism, poetry, essay, and satire. As a study in literature, we will also engage with interdisciplinary scholarship to help us situate these texts in a larger conversation. Class discussions and essays will ask us to examine these narratives and their contexts, as well as the representational and stylistic choices these authors make on the page.
LIT 374 American Literature to 1800
Professor: Michele Tarter
Course Meetings: Meeting in the Blended Learning Format: Synchronous classes are January 5, 12 and 19, 2026
to colonial times, and what they’ve found is both fascinating and disturbing.
Join us as we look at life and culture in the colonies. We’ll begin with cross-cultural encounters, particularly when the Indigenous people welcomed European explorers and Puritan settlers to what is controversially called “The New World.” We’ll then turn to all forms of dissent literature evolving from this multicultural time period: captivity narratives; witchcraft trial records; slave narratives; travel logs; women’s diaries and letters; and female seduction novels of Revolutionary America. This body of material forms the
foundation of any study on American culture, thought, and identity formation.