Birth and death mark the boundaries of human existence, framing the start and end of life and serving as powerful symbols of creation and closure, hope and despair, renewal and conclusion. In this introductory literary studies course we will identify and discuss texts from across a range of literary forms and genres – including essays, novels, poems, and short fiction – that grapple with natality and mortality. What do we learn from the inevitability of death? How do birth and rebirth shape our ethical and personal identities? How does facing our inevitable end affect our present thriving? Drawing on writers like Hannah Arendt, Toni Morrison, Clorice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Emmanuel Levinas, this course will examine how experiences of origins and endings are the crucible of selfhood and what they have to teach us about the nature of literary study. Assignments will invite students to engage in close reading and critical analysis of literary texts in order to reflect on how birth and death are interwoven and imaginatively reconciled, aiming toward personal growth and a deeper relationship to literary studies.