LitLab

Young Adult Fiction Bring a passage from your favorite piece of YA fiction to share and talk about! We'll also brainstorm other topics that you want to discuss this term.

Convenor(s): Elizabeth Propst Comics are one of the greatest publishing success stories of the digital age. Comics are also the source material for some of the most dominant pop cultural productions of the past two decades (Marvel Studios, Batman, History...

Convenor(s): Madi Fabber The post-MeToo landscape has given rise to shows and stories created by women that explore the aftermath of sexual assault. At times borrowing from the conventions of the detective story or thriller, these works depict women...

Convenor(s): Cindy Zhang & Michelle Kurilla The past year has seen the rise of a new sub-genre: the personal pandemic essay. What are the possibilities and limitations of this "quick response" art, to borrow a phrase from The Atlantic? We will check out a...

Digitally-generated content is now a huge part of what we read and write--from blogs and social media to internet fan fiction and web-born poems. Digital tools are also increasingly important in the production of knowledge in the humanities. This week, we...

This week we’ll watch and discuss a public lecture by an important literary figure currently at Harvard. Open to the Harvard community. For more information visit our canvas site: Canvas

The remarkable ethnic diversity of the United States is the result of the many generations of immigrants who have settled here. Many people now living in America have parents or grandparents who came from other places; many have recently arrived...

Humor has often been associated with the assertion of aggression or superiority, at least since Sigmund Freud offered his theory of comedy as a manifestation of unconscious hostility in his work “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” published in...

Young Adult literature is one of the fastest growing and most popular areas of the publishing industry, and yet YA fiction writers still have trouble getting the respect they deserve. Why is this the case? What has contributed to the marginalization of YA...

Literary scholars and writers sometimes find new documents that change the way we think about authors, texts, periods, and cultural movements. What do these “discoveries” mean? How and why are they important? Who gets credit for a discovery and what makes...