Thematic Groupings

One popular format that has evolved over the last two decades is the thematically organized course that juxtaposes Western and non-Western texts. Since such courses frequently satisfy distributional requirements without being a required core course of the sort sketched out above, they allow individual instructors great flexibility in preparing syllabi. With minor adjustments, these groupings will work for any constituency and in any teaching situation: introductory, intermediate, or upper level; taught by an individual literature teacher or by an interdisciplinary team; taught within a departmental or a consortial program. Simply for the sake of demonstrating possibilities, topics that seem especially appropriate for particular pedagogical approaches have been linked to those approaches.

Two themes that college students find personally compelling—love and selfhood—lend themselves to many kinds of syllabi. Under the broad headings below, you will find subdivisions of each theme. You could pick one or two works from several of these subdivisions or concentrate on one in depth to fill out a satisfying semester-long course. Different rubrics could well be proposed and many of these readings distributed differently among them—as always, these suggestions are meant to spark your own interest rather than to preclude further experimentation.