Seminar in Literature

3 units

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson first achieved national acclaim with "Housekeeping" (1980), a haunting coming-of-age novel about two sisters set in the beauty and grandeur of the west. That novel eventually established Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she taught for many years. What many noticed in her first book was a new sort of voice, a lyric prose, which returned over two decades later in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Gilead" (2004). Since then, she has written two more novels ("Home" and "Lila") set in the same town, but with radically different voices and perspectives. Between these novels and her collected essays, Robinson's work engages issues of race, gender, history, regionalism, and religion. Her later work has focused in particular on the role of the humanities and higher education. She has been a lecturer in high demand (appearing at Wash U in November 2018), and she has been interviewed many times-most noticeably by Barack Obama for "The New York Review of Books." In this class, we will read all her published books, asking questions of development, style, and voice. Meanwhile, as we see what critical engagements have been made with her writings, we will situate her within broader academic discourses (like feminist studies, critical race theory, or religion and literature), and ask how various approaches can open new insights into her writings. In this class students will write both a personal essay (responding to an essay of Robinson's) and a critical seminar paper engaging any topic raised by her work.