ENGL1735 · Complex Problems and Enduring Questions

The Meaning of Boston: Literature and Culture

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

What does a city--this city in which we find ourselves--mean? Meaning flows through a city just as populations, capital, power, resources, and ideas do, and each of these flows conditions the others. As we consider what Boston has meant in different moments and to different people, we engage follow-on questions: How does the form of a text express meaning? How can we understand the relationship between that text and the historical moment in which it took form, and/or the historical moment it seeks to capture? What happens when we consider the local in relation to national and international events and artistic movements? Our students will develop skills of historical reasoning, will learn how to interpret works of literature and allied arts, and will sharpen their analytical thinking and writing skills within the disciplinary traditions of history and literary/cultural studies. We will encourage them to move beyond the received meanings and standard tropes of Boston--the accent, the city on a hill, the regular-guy mythos retailed by Hollywood--and explore questions that Boston has consistently raised about human beings and nature, race and class difference, the form and function of the good life, the double-edged quality of moral causes, and the contest between the persistence of old ways and the succession of new ones.