All Reading & Composition courses must be taken for a letter grade in order to fulfill this requirement for the Bachelor’s Degree. This course satisfies the second half or the “B” portion of the Reading and Composition requirement.

This course will take on some strange minds in literature. Beginning our quest with several classic Russian works (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev), we will turn our attention to a couple of 20th century examples (Woolf, Proust, Nabokov and others).   The course will examine what it means when strange characters begin to think.  What kinds of outsider minds emerge in novels, stories, and poems?  We will attempt to find a link between the representation of the mind in Russian literature and its later appearance in British, American, and French fiction.  This course will examine many different types of mental experiences: dreams, altered states of mind, and mental illness.

Texts:
Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 978-0140449921
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double, 978-0375719011
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 978-0393927979
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 978-0156628709

Prerequisite: Successful completion of the “A” portion of the Reading & Composition requirement or its equivalent. Students may not enroll in nor attend R1B/R5B courses without completing this prerequisite.