Course Description
This course aims to offer a platform for students to experiment with innovative ways of making connections between literature and new contexts. Three major capstones and stages in this class are literary narratives, new contexts, and connections between narratives and contexts. This student-centered and project-based course starts by encouraging students to review and re-evaluate what they have learned from literary training and pushes them to appreciate the challenges of the new contexts to literary narratives. The class momentum is derived not from a review of knowledge or a new set of information but from attempts of students: they are expected to take initiative to explore and defend connections of literature and the broad world they establish.

First of all, the students will be given a grander context of what they have learned from the literary education, which, traditionally, is “literature for literature’s sake.” The challenge is to look at literature from another perspective to see how literature can be used as groundwork or platform to conceive of new possibilities and applications of new contexts. Certainly, the “contexts” are very open, and with this in mind, the openness leads to the second stage: identification of contexts (e.g., literature in digital culture, literature in global culture). This identification encourages the students to seek to use the framework as a metonym to refer to the quite modern and digitalized social spaces.

With the framework as a starting point followed by expounded contextualized connections between literature and new contexts, in the third stage the students are required to complete and defend their own projects. These projects could entail different modes of communication, including visual and digital media, to express the result of the final project. No matter what they do, the students are also required to use the English language as the major rhetorical element in the final project.