Jul 01, 2025  
2024-2025 Undergraduate Hill Book 
    
2024-2025 Undergraduate Hill Book

ENG 100/161 - Dramatic Voices: Influences of Orality in Literature

3 Credits
Offered periodically
While literature implies a written text, this course will explore the relationship between speech and writing. What does it mean for one form to be privileged over another? Or for each to inform the other? In this course, we will examine texts that are meant to be spoken aloud, like the oral traditions of epic poetry and origin stories, and texts that are meant to be performed, like drama, speeches, and contemporary slam poetry. We will also come to understand the performative nature of literary texts through an emphasis on narrative voice in fiction and the aural properties of poetry. The voices we encounter may be formal, colloquial, multilingual, lyrical, or unreliable as we discover what voice can reveal about personality and power.

Core Curriculum Attribute(s): Language, Arts, and Humanities