ENGL 236: Reading, Writing, & Archives: Literary Boston

Whose story gets told? How is that story told and remembered? Whose story doesn't get told, or gets hidden? The answers to these questions for students of literature, rhetoric, and language are found in archives, living treasures of human experience. This course is an exploration of archives generally and Boston archives in particular, as it creates an opportunity for students to read and interpret letters, diaries, journals, books, short stories, publications, and other original literary material in order to discover the specific literary, cultural, geographic, and social moments in which they were created. The course will feature field trips, workshops, and instructional research sessions in order to engage with material like the Hemingway Papers at JFK Library and Archive, meet literary women preserved within the Schlesinger Library at Harvard's digital repository, learn about community archives for LGBTQ Boston, and examine multiple local collections from the University Archives and Special Collections on UMass Boston's campus. This course teaches basic methods for students to begin to construct and reconstruct stories, and to start out further work where the individual's interests in literature, writing, theory, and/or language may take them. The course is aligned with the aims of the Humanities General Education requirement which asks students to develop an informed appreciation of human culture and an exploration of the human condition, and is a hands-on, Interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation.