Study of literature written inside the UK by authors of African, South Asian, and Caribbean lineage. Occasional. We will map out the trajectory of black presence in British Literature using the lenses of history, politics, and culture. We will observe Britain’s painful process of naming/ renaming of the black presence, and the blackness’s literary and political struggle to make its existence noted in the imagined literary community of British Literature. Reading materials of this class will cover 20th century British literature.

LIT 3212 is designated as a Research-Intensive (RI) course. This designation will be noted on your transcripts. Your active engagement in the research and/or creative scholarship process will be the core of your learning experience in this course. A significant portion of your grade for LIT 3212 will be derived from both your active participation in the research process and the tangible course-related project(s) that comes out of said project. If you have any questions about this designation, please ask your course instructor. Detailed Description: This course walks you through the process of conducting literary research while helping to refine your library skills. Along the way, we will draw from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Framework. According to the ACRL, “Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers lead to additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field.” We will discuss this concept more in-depth throughout the course. Your goal in the course is to produce a research paper suitable for publication in a literary studies journal. The course will also focus on a research project created by Jada, an English major who conducted a literary study of James Baldwin’s classic short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” The basic textbook we will be using for our class is Strategies for Conducting Literary Research, 2e, an Open Educational Resource (meaning it’s free!). It has loads of concepts and vocabulary, some of which you may not have encountered before. In a research-based course, your instructor may require you to write a research paper of 6-12 pages, but the knowledge you need to perform this task can fill up dozens or hundreds of pages. Writing about literature is a complicated, often messy process; it needs to meet high standards while incorporating knowledge from other fields such as psychology, history, science, and other arts. It entails knowledge about language, genre, structures, styles, and more. To produce good research about literature, we need to know a lot of things about a lot of things! Although we will discuss the research process in a linear fashion throughout this course, you’ll find that, in practice, literary research is a highly recursive process. We’re constantly circling back through the process as we write. Because writing instructors are locked into presenting the writing process in a linear way, we tend to discuss it in terms of stages such as preliminary research, drafting, revising, and so on. But writing a research paper requires us to rethink and redo our work at any stage. It’s not uncommon for writers to be in the middle of proofreading (one of the final stages) and realize they need to go back and gather more research. Though this course focuses on research about literature, the skills and knowledge in these chapters apply to many other areas and topics, especially in the humanities. Key Objectives for This Course • Read disciplinary texts and develop a “toolbox” of content knowledge, core principles, and practices. • Improve research, interpretation, writing, and argumentation skills about literary texts and society by obtaining, critically evaluating, and synthesizing scholarly literature and relevant data. • Implement appropriate methodologies to address key research problems. • Gain communication skills through the dissemination of the research (process and product) in appropriate formats and venues, including professional journals and platforms in literary studies. • A more granular breakdown of course objectives is below: o Understand the assignment o Identify a research problem o Develop audience awareness o Enter a scholarly conversation o Understand theory’s integral role within humanities research o Understand how theory relates to particular research methodologies and methods for gathering evidence o Learn to use online library catalogs, database search strategies, library services, citation management, and search alerts o Evaluate source credibility o Posit your research question o Posit a thesis statement o Compose a title o Define your key terms o Write persuasively o Write academic prose o Steer clear of plagiarism “Research & Writing about Literature” is a Gordon Rule course, which means you will produce at least 6000 words of evaluated writing as required by the English Department. Each Gordon Rule assignment has the following characteristics: 1. The writing will have a clearly defined central idea or thesis. 2. It will provide adequate support for that idea 3. It will be organized clearly and logically 4. It will show awareness of the conventions of standard written English 5. It will be formatted or presented in an appropriate way Note that our course discussions will take place in Yellowdig, a social media type application. You are free to use any of the questions there or to post your own questions and topics.