The Meaning of Boston: History and Memory

This is an Enduring Question course and is open to FRESHMEN only. You must take both ENGL1735 and HIST1630. How does a city -- this city in which we find ourselves -- create meaning? Meaning flows through a city just as populations, capital, power, resources, and ideas do, and each of these flows conditions the others. In this course, we will consider what Boston has meant in different moments and to different people as we think about the forms of literary texts, how they express meaning, and their relationships to the historical moments in which they took shape and/or seek to capture. We will also consider the local in relation to national and international events and artistic movements. Throughout the semester, our discussions will move beyond the received meanings and standard tropes of Boston -- the accent, the city on a hill, the regular-guy mythos retailed by Hollywood -- to 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.