Professor: Mai-Lin Cheng

4.00 credits

CRN 16108: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:50pm @ GSH 132

In this course, we will analyze the connections between reading and writing as we explore what "book love" means in both literary works (i.e. novels, poems, short stories) and the world of commonplace books, books in which readers created their own personal anthologies, with passages, images, and other artifacts important to them. Some of the questions we will ask include: What kinds of selves emerge and/or represented in these works? How do we read a book that is made up of a series of often unrelated fragments and extracts? What is reading, and how do we understand its multiple histories?  We will work with the archives of UO Special Collections, both in and out of class, and select online digital collections.