The course serves as an introduction to the field of literary studies. It will familiarize you with disciplinary concepts and terminology and help you to close read literary texts and to place these texts into wider socio-political and historical contexts to gain a fuller understanding of their meaning and significance.

This specific section of the course focuses on what we'll be calling "activist texts," texts that sought to stage interventions into their historical moments. To engage with our own historical moment of social justice protest, the course asks how we might use the tools of literary study within the public and digital space of Wikipedia to stage our own intervention, how we might engage in knowledge production in ways that support equity and diversity.

More specifically, we will be working in groups to expand the stub-class article on the Charles Chesnutt novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina coup d'etat, which has long been suppressed and distorted in the historical record, the novel asks its readers to confront the violent legacy of white supremacy in the U.S., a legacy that continues to play out in Black Lives Matter protests across the country. By expanding the article, we will be helping to bring the novel--and the important issues it addresses--more fully into public awareness.