Readings in World Literature II
Course Code
HUMA 11100 20
Course Description
The theme for this course of Readings in World Literature is "Autobiography/ Writing the Self."
It examines the nature of autobiographical writing from a wide range of cultural and historical contexts, including texts such as Augustine's Confessions, Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Wole Soyinka's Aké and Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home. While last quarter focused on the genre of the epic-texts that imagine and even create a people's sense of a shared past and a shared culture-this quarter will focus on how individuals imagine their own, particular lives.
We will explore, among other issues, how the self is constructed through reading and writing, the relationship between memory and identity, the claims of authenticity or truth, the oscillation between interior and exterior life, and the peculiarities of individual voice.
Course Criteria
This course is only open to incoming UChicago transfer students. Please visit the Summer Session Incoming Transfer Students page to apply.
This course must be taken alongside HUMA 11000, Readings in World Literature I, as well as an afternoon writing course that runs August 3-September 11, 2026 (no class September 7).
Instructor(s)
Maylenne Sternstein
Other Courses to Consider
These courses might also be of interest.
- Readings in World Literature I
The theme for the course of Readings in World Literature is "The Epic".
Beginning with the oldest extant literary text known to mankind, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and moving on to India's national epic The Mahabharata as well as The Odyssey, we study epic texts that are central to the literary and cultural traditions of various regions and peoples of the world.
As an introduction to the study of the Humanities, this course will help you develop your skills in textual analysis, independent critical thinking, and expository writing. As a course on literature, it will pay particular attention to issues such as narrative structure, verse form, performativity and poetic devices, but also to the question of how literature might matter for our lives here and now.
As a course that aims to address world literatures, this class will focus on ways in which texts from different cultural backgrounds articulate the cultural values, existential anxieties, and power structures of the societies that produced them.
Residential