ENG 2573 DIFFICULT BOOKS
Desperate times call for difficult measures: We need to be reading difficult books, and this course will have us do just that. There's a keen pleasure in having to work for something, in a book that calls on its reader to do the complicated work required to appreciate a genuinely complicated set of characters. Sure, friends and fans of easy, we could let the hero get the girl (or guy) every time, but don't things get more interesting if we ask of our literature something a bit more convoluted than that? And here's the rub: True literature has always asked of us something convoluted, something tangled, something messy, something, well, difficult: It wants us to inhabit the lives of people who are themselves difficult, and whose motivations and actions may be (should be?) contradictory or unsettling. Difficult books, finally, address difficult questions. Whatever it is that other sorts of books do doesn't much matter, does it?
Course Types
Expression, Literature