Course

The Getting of Wisdom: Youth, Literature and the Formation of the Self - ARTS3054

Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

School: School of the Arts and Media

Course Outline: School of the Arts and Media

Campus: Sydney

Career: Undergraduate

Units of Credit: 6

EFTSL: 0.12500 (more info)

Indicative Contact Hours per Week: 3

Enrolment Requirements:

Prerequisite: 48 UOC overall, including 6 UOC at level 1 and 6 UOC at level 2 in one of the following streams, English

CSS Contribution Charge: 1 (more info)

Tuition Fee: See Tuition Fee Schedule

Further Information: See Class Timetable

View course information for previous years.

Description

Subject Area: English

What do you want to be when you grow up? At some point during the eighteenth century, this question went from being more or less meaningless to one of the central preoccupations of Western literature and culture: the driving principle of countless—if not most—classic novels, and the occasion for many canonical works in other genres and media. The idea that the shape of an individual life follows a basic pattern of development, leading from the open-ended possibility of youth to the stable identity of adulthood, seems self-evident to us, but this idea has a history: it has been figured, configured and reconfigured in many different ways over the past 250 years, and continues to mutate and develop under our eyes today. The aim of this course is to track the related ideas of youth, adulthood and development over this period, as they are represented in key works of literature and cinema, and especially within the genre of the Bildungsroman. Our inquiry will be guided by the assumption that narratives of development, in prose, poetry and film, are not only passive reflections of reality, but rather that these literary and film representations are essential tools for making sense of our time-bound lives. Accordingly, your engagement with these questions will take the form of class discussion and a traditional essay, but also an original narrative in which you implement your understanding of the genre. The course is designed as a history of ideas and representations, but also as a toolkit, which will help us think about what it means to come of age in our own society and how best to approach the problem of education.

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