https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/L_ALBALES101This course trains students in the close reading of, and critical reflection on, literary and critical texts from a variety of national, cultural and historical backgrounds, and from diverse disciplinary angles. Students learn about social and academic debates regarding the relationship between literature and society. Students practice with written and verbal presentations of their own research. Students learn how to provide their peers with constructive feedback.For centuries, literary and other cultural texts have changed the way people think and look at the world. They reveal social injustices and societal ills, offering ideas and ammunition for social change, thereby helping people to imagine different, better realities. A single text may trigger an individual’s struggle for emancipation, but also that of a group or a nation. This course will explore the important ways in which literary texts have contributed to societal change and have liberated people throughout the centuries up to the present. The texts we discuss have instigated individual readers as well as collectivities to discover and become aware of injustices, unfairness and abuse. This course analyzes that process, using the following questions as leading threads in the discussions: Which rhetorical strategies employed in the texts evoke the readers’ empathy and possible agency? How do the texts simultaneously assist in emboldening the reader, strengthening an emerging community, and gaining acceptance from a wider audience? In which way do they balance realities that are already being lived and imagined possibilities that have yet to materialize? How do they interact with other expressions of the struggle for emancipation, by way of imitation, opposition, appropriation? And, finally, how do they function within the communities that they have helped found, how are they remembered, recreated, redefined, and to which purposes?Students and instructor meet three times per week: Lectures, 1 x 2 hours per week. Seminar meetings, 2 x 2 hours per week.Assessment: Participation (20%), written task (50%), and final report (30%). Students will only receive credits for the course if their grade for the written exam is 5.5 or higher. They are not allowed to compensate an exam grade that is below 5.5 with other partial grades.Primary and secondary sources; to be announced on Canvas.This course is only open for first year students of Literature & Society: English, or students enrolled in the Schoolvakminor English Literature. Please note, this course is NOT suitable for exchange students.There is a slightly different enrollment procedure for this module. The standard procedure of the Faculty of Humanities has students sign up for (i) the module, and (ii) the form of tuition (lecture and/or preferred seminar group). However, for this module the instructor will assign the students to the seminar groups. Therefore, students should sign up for (i) the module, but not for (ii) the seminar groups.This course is obligatory in the first year. Attendance required: 80% (including lectures, seminars, practicums). Students who miss more than 20% will not receive credits for the course. Exceptions may be made in grave personal circumstances. Make sure to inform both your lecturer and the academic advisor in such cases.The history and literature of social movements such as feminism and the abolitionist and anti-apartheid movements.