T.S. Eliot: The Poetics of Modernity

Professor: Matthew Mutter  

Course Number: LIT 3147

CRN Number: 10393

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies

This course will use the poetry, philosophy, and cultural criticism of T.S. Eliot as a framework for exploring the multiple intellectual challenges of modernity. We will begin by investigating the cultural contexts out of which literary modernism arose—the crisis of liberal progressivism in the wake of WWI, the exhaustion of Romanticism and philosophical Idealism, the fragmentation of social norms and the experience of anomie and ennui—as well as specific influences on Eliot’s early work (Baudelaire, Laforgue, Pound, Santayana, Freud, and Durkheim). With steady attention to his interlocutors, we will trace the development of Eliot’s poetic and philosophical project from the radical critique of modern epistemology in his dissertation to his later contemplative poems and plays. Along the way we will explore the ongoing tensions Eliot strived to negotiate: tradition v. poetic innovation and a comprehensive philosophical skepticism; the desire for psychological and cultural integration v. the acknowledgement of fragmentation; and a sustained attraction to (and profound knowledge of) the religious ideas of the East v. his immersion in Christian mysticism. The course will also aim to understand Eliot’s remarkable self-revisions throughout his career and the vagaries of Eliot’s reputation as a critic and poet in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hannah Arendt: Reading The Human Condition and the Plurality of Languages

Professor: Thomas Wild  

Course Number: LIT 318

CRN Number: 10391

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: German Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy

This seminar will be centered on a detailed exploration of Hannah Arendt's pivotal work The Human Condition. We will close-read Arendt's book and discuss her re-thinking of the political and its languages, which is carried by reflections on phenomena and concepts such as action, speech, power, plurality, freedom, world, labor, work, the private and the public sphere. Activating a driving trope of Arendt's book – "to think what we are doing" – we will have an equally close look at how The Human Condition is crafted, i.e. at its poetics. Arendt's deliberations were written in conversation with philosophers, political thinkers and poets ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine over Marx, Montesquieu, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Faukner, Rilke, and Kafka. Our inquiry will look at a variety of scholarly and artistic responses to Arendt's work. And we will refine our scrutiny by branching out into further writings by Arendt concerned with issues related to The Human Condition, such as her essays On Violence, Truth and Politics, Thinking and Moral Considerations, and on poetic thinkers like Lessing, Benjamin, and Auden. Reading Hannah Arendt's plurality of languages, as we will explore, means not only to address the multi-lingual fabric of her texts, but also the diverse modes and tones in which her critical writing encourages us to think about the task of responding to the political and intellectual challenge of tyranny and totalitarianism – then and today.

Love and Death in Dante

Professor: Joseph Luzzi  

Course Number: LIT 3205

CRN Number: 10394

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Italian Studies

What makes Dante’s Divine Comedy so essential to our lives today, even though it was written seven centuries ago? This course will explore the fascinating world of Dante’s epic poem in all its cultural and historical richness, as we consider Dante’s relation to his beloved hometown of Florence, his lacerating experience of exile, and his lifelong devotion to his muse Beatrice, among many other issues. We will pay special attention to the originality and brilliance of Dante’s poetic vision, as we see how he transformed his great poem into one of the most influential works in literary history, both in Italy and throughout the world. Course/reading in English. This is a Pre-1800 Literature Course offering.

Climate Fiction

Professor: Daniel Williams  

Course Number: LIT 3251

CRN Number: 10395

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 206

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? How has our urgent ecological crisis shaped the scales, genres, and plots of contemporary fiction? This course surveys the literary genre that has lately come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, we will consider realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. Regions may include the United States, Europe, West Africa, and India; authors may include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, Amitav Ghosh, and Ian McEwan. We will examine how literature engages (or not) central concepts in earth-system science and scenarios of ecological calamity (hurricanes, megafires, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss); how it critiques (or not) environmental racism and injustice; and how it envisions possible futures for humanity in the Anthropocene. Reading critical materials from across the environmental humanities, we will also think about the challenges of narrative, representation, sympathy, and imagination as they apply to literature and climate policy. The course will emphasize methods of research, writing, and revision essential for Senior Projects in literature and other humanities fields. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Race and Real Estate

Professor: Peter L'Official  

Course Number: LIT 328

CRN Number: 10387

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

This seminar explores how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and how, in turn, space can be shaped by racism. Our tools to investigate these constructions will be literary (novels, essays, poetry), theoretical (urban and architectural theory & criticism), historical (art history, urban history), and cultural (film and music). Of these works, we will ask: how have contemporary works of literature, film, architecture, and visual art captured and critiqued the built environment, and offered alternative understandings of space and place, home and work, citizenship and property? How are our spaces and structures imagined and coded in terms of proximity to whiteness and Blackness, class, gender, and ability, and how have we learned to read and internalize such codes? We will consider particular built forms, from shotgun houses to skyscrapers, and from ethnic enclaves to cities writ large. Authors and artists may include: Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, Spike Lee, June Jordan, Mat Johnson, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison. This course is a Literature Program junior seminar and fulfills the American and Indigenous Studies junior seminar requirement. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

Solidarity with the Nonhuman: Poetry as Coexistence

Professor: Cole Heinowitz  

Course Number: LIT 3330

CRN Number: 10396

Class cap: 17

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

How do you write about what you do not, and cannot, rationally know? How can poetry address the presence of the nonhuman in the world and in ourselves? What kind of psychic and political orientation emerges from the acknowledgment that no rigid, stable boundary separates humans from other organisms and objects—that human existence is necessarily a coexistence with the nonhuman? Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, these questions became a focal point for innovative thinking about poetics; since that time, their urgency has only intensified. Our study in this course charts the compositional practices (e.g. attunement, dictation, and somatics) by which experimental writers from the eighteenth century to the present have approached and sought to encounter the nonhuman in language. Readings will include works by Diderot, Edward Young, Goethe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Ruskin, Yeats, H.D., Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, Alejandra Pizarnik, Hannah Weiner, and C.A. Conrad.

Fantastika and the New Gothic

Professor: Bradford Morrow  

Course Number: LIT 334

CRN Number: 10392

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

The critical boundaries between literary and genre fiction have become increasingly ambiguous over the past several decades, thanks to the liberating and ambitious work by a number of pioneering writers. Traditional gothic authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mary Shelley, Sara Coleridge, E. A. Poe, the Brontë sisters, Bram Stoker, and others framed their tales within the metaphoric landscapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by protagonists whose troubled psyches led them far beyond the verges of propriety and sanity. While embracing these fundamentally dark artistic visions, later masters radically reinvented and contemporized tropes, settings, and narrative strategies to create a new era in this tradition. Identified as the New Gothic, this phase appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon, termed by speculative fiction theorist John Clute as Fantastika, whose achievement is to have taken the genres of the fantastic, fabular, and horror in a similar groundbreaking literary direction. While not dismissing the fundamental spirit that animates its genre forebears, writers such as Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, N. K. Jemisin, Joyce Carol Oates, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, Sofia Samatar, Julia Elliott, George Saunders, and Elizabeth Hand have created a body of serious literary fiction that we will focus on in this course. Several authors will join us in person and via Zoom to discuss their work with the class.

Transpacific Crossings

Professor: Hua Hsu  

Course Number: LIT 364

CRN Number: 10390

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies

This seminar theorizes the transpacific, a figurative space between the United States and Asia where ideas, images and anxieties of identity (national and racial), modernity, and nationhood circulate. The course draws from an array of sources: from classics of the American canon to experimental poetry to modern Asian American memoir. How did anxieties around Pacific trade and exploration shade classics of the American canon? How have contemporary writers sought to reconcile historical rupture or dislocation through formal experimentation? What happens when Asian American writers seek an imagined, ancestral "home"--and what frictions emerge when American notions of racial difference drift beyond these borders? What explains the special place of Asia in the West's speculative visions of the future? Possible authors include: Karen Tei Yamashita, Nam Le, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ruth Ozeki, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Bad Art: On Amateurs, Hacks, Sellouts, and Robots

Professor: Adhaar Desai  

Course Number: LIT 365

CRN Number: 10389

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

On what grounds may someone responsibly declare that a work of literature is mediocre, mid, trash, or simply not worth one's time? In what ways does it make sense to judge artwork by a generative AI differently than artwork we know to be by human beings? This course interrogates the ethics and practices of critical judgment by studying theoretical concepts like the sublime, the mediocre, the gimmick, and the hack. As we read influential theoretical texts by writers like Longinus, Fanon, Bourdieu, and Ngai, we will also tackle aesthetically challenging works that reflect upon artistic cultural production like William Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream,* Helen Dewitt's *The Last Samurai,* and Percival Everett's *Erasure.* We will also consider an array of poetry, short fiction, and professional criticism of varying quality (we will, unfortunately, have to confront some supposedly bad art). Students will be challenged to compose responsible aesthetic criticism and also to develop a research project that critically engages an aesthetic problem of their choosing. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction

Professor: Ursula Embola  

Course Number: LIT 369

CRN Number: 10388

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights 

"Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction" is a reading-intensive course that introduces students to contemporary texts in English translation penned by award-winning Cameroonian-American author Patrice Nganang. Students taking this course will develop an appreciation of the historical, cultural, thematic, and aesthetic preoccupations expressed within Nganang's trilogy of historical fiction novels centered on Cameroon's development into a West/Central African nation over the course of the 20th century. A key question that sits at the heart of this course is the following: "How is the literary genre of historical fiction employed by Nganang in the work of crafting a Cameroonian national identity, and how is that work complicated by the specificity of the Cameroonian multicultural, multilingual, and postcolonial situation?" The course seeks to use Literature as a means of decolonizing African history and is designed to provide students with exciting and challenging new learning experiences which they can easily apply to other areas of their academic journeys. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Reading Emily Dickinson

Professor: Philip Pardi  

Course Number: LIT 379

CRN Number: 10294

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   10:30 AM - 4:30 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Experimentlal Humanities; Written Arts

Although frequently depicted as living and working in isolation, Emily Dickinson was vitally connected to the world around her. In this class, we will immerse ourselves in Dickinson’s writing, in the writers she was drawn to, and in the historical moment of which she was a part. By exploring how her work participates in the poetic practices and intellectual currents of her day, we will sharpen our understanding of her unique, even radical, contribution to American poetry. Along the way, we will consider Dickinson as a reader (of Emerson, the Psalms, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and periodicals delivering news of the Civil War, for example) as well as her influence on poets who have read and responded to her (Adrienne Rich, Lorine Niedecker, Camille Dungy, and Rae Armantrout, to name a few). And as we read our way into Dickinson’s world, we will also take up the question of reading itself: What does it mean to read a poem “closely” and what kind(s) of attention does the act of reading require of us? What happens in the brain when we read and how can we enrich or deepen the experience? Note on Course Format: This course meets once a week for six hours. At the beginning of each session, we will turn off our phones (and laptops, smart watches, etc.) and be completely offline for the duration of the class. This will allow us to explore our existing habits as readers and to experiment with new ones. (Students who have concerns about the format of the course should contact the professor before registration.)

Literature Senior Colloquium I

Professor: Marisa Libbon  

Course Number: LIT 405

CRN Number: 10632

Class cap: 15

Credits: 1

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

(To be taken concurrently with LIT 401) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers.

Literature Senior Colloquium II

Professor: Marisa Libbon  

Course Number: LIT 406

CRN Number: 10633

Class cap: 15

Credits: 1

Schedule/Location:

Mon       5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

(To be taken concurrently with LIT 402) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers.

Ancient Literary Criticism

Course Number: CLAS 329

CRN Number: 10110

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Professor:

Daniel Mendelsohn

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists:

Greek; Literature; Written Arts

Class Matters: Vocabularies of Contempt from Balzac to Ernaux

Course Number: FREN 321

CRN Number: 10114

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Professor:

Marina van Zuylen

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists:

Literature

Contemporary German Literature and Film

Professor: Thomas Wild  

Course Number: GER 422

CRN Number: 10117

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Campus Center Red Room

Mon       6:00 PM - 8:00 PM Olin 102

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists: Literature

Does Might Make Right?

Professor: Thomas Bartscherer  

Course Number: HR 346 OSU

CRN Number: 10636

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      9:10 AM - 11:30 AM OSUN Course

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: Classical Studies; Literature

John Ashbery: The Art of Response

Course Number: WRIT 373

CRN Number: 10405

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Professor:

Ann Lauterbach

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin Languages Center 206

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists:

Art History and Visual Culture; Literature

Rhythms and Words

Course Number: WRIT 374

CRN Number: 10406

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Professor:

Michael Ives

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists:

Literature