Learn new ways of interpreting literary texts, from time-tested methods to computer-assisted practices such as distant reading. As we make sense of what we read, we construe meaning using the ancient cultural technique of interpretation. Only rarely do we actually reflect this process: what are the means that help us to understand literary texts? How does interpretation work? And how has our increasing use of e-books and tablets changed the way we read and interpret literature?
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This free online course addresses these key questions as it introduces you to a variety of ways of interpreting literary texts. We will look into time-tested methods such as close reading and historical contextualisation. We shall also address more recent, computer-assisted practices such as distant reading.
Syllabus
Week 1: How we read today
Week 2: Close reading
Week 3: Hyper reading & social reading
Week 4: New Historicism
Week 5: Distant reading
Week 6: Surface reading & the materiality of communication
What will you achieve?
- Reflect on the different lay and professional reading strategies that are available for reading literature today.
- Describe the various media in which we read literature in the digital age.
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of different reading strategies.
- Apply the core method of literary studies: close reading.
- Investigate the various strategies you use on a daily basis as you read online texts.
- Engage in a cooperative form of online reading called social reading.
- Compare two forms of historical readings of literary texts: historical and literary-historical contextualization.
- Discuss the uses and limitations of distant reading, a recent scholarly approach to literary texts that relies on big data and computer analysis.
- Report on your own distant reading experiment, using the Google Ngram Viewer.
- Explore approaches to literary texts that do not seek to interpret them but focus on their surface and materiality.
Who is the course for?
This course is for people from all walks of life who enjoy reading literature and would like to know how literary scholars interpret texts in the digital age.
If you are a student looking for an introduction to literary analysis, ‘Literature in the Digital Age’ will provide that.
The only requirement is that you like to read and love to reflect your experience and discuss it with others.
