Historical studies in the Comparative,
English and American literature traditions are organized into sequences. Please
notify the instructor if you need a sequence course in order to moderate in
spring 2018.
18154 |
LIT 204 CompARATIVE
LitERATURE: Ancient Literature |
Thomas Bartscherer |
M 1:30 pm 2:50 pm W 1:30 pm 2:50 pm |
OLIN 301 HEG 308 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Classical Studies
In a celebrated passage
from Plato's Republic, Socrates claims that there is "an ancient quarrel
between philosophy and poetry." In this course, we will consider this and other
ways in which ancient authors (or their characters) configured the relationship
between poetic production and theoretical inquiry, and therewith gave birth to
the practice of literary criticism in the West. We will begin with Homer's
Iliad and Odyssey, focusing particularly on the understanding of poetry
manifest within the world of these poems.
18155 |
LIT 204B Comparative
Literature II: 1600 - 1800 |
Joseph Luzzi |
M W 10:10 am-11:30 am |
OLIN 201 |
LA |
ELIT |
How does the concept of "literature"
undergo a fascinating transition in the two centuries between
Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) and Wordsworth and
Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1800)? What did it mean to write as a woman
during this time? How did issues of slavery, political resistance, and emergent
democracy shape literary culture? And how did other art forms painting, music,
sculpture, architecture influence writers from the Baroque to the
Enlightenment and Romantic ages? These are some of the questions we will
explore as we consider the world of literature from c. 1600 to 1800 in Calder n, Equiano, Goethe, Manzoni, Montesquieu, Racine,
and Sor Juana, among others, in this period
of scientific, cultural, and political revolution. Class size: 22
18156 |
LIT 251 English
Literature II |
Noor Desai |
T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLIN 308 |
LA |
ELIT |
This course explores seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a
period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of
divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic
figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben
Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate
interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values.
After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a
reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did
in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the stories and novels
by Behn and Sterne which appealed to middle-class
readers. Class size:
18
18157 |
LIT 252 English
Literature III |
Stephen Graham |
M W 11:50 am-1:10 pm |
OLIN 307 |
LA |
ELIT |
This course surveys major developments in British
literature from the Romantic Era through the twentieth century, a period during
which the very notion of "Literature" as an object of study took shape. As we
engage with canonical texts from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist
periods, we will simultaneously examine the methodologies and underlying
assumptions of literary study as presently constituted, with an emphasis upon
the theory and practice of "close reading" as a means of generating critical
prose. Major authors will include Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Woolf,
Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. Class size: 18
18158 |
LIT 258 American
Literature II |
Elizabeth Frank |
W Th 10:10 am-11:30 am |
ASP 302 |
LA D+J |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban
Studies This
course explores the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century and
seeks to sharpen student practice in close reading and historical
contextualization. Discussion includes a
variety of topics, among them the engrafting of American Puritanism with
American Romanticism; wilderness, westward expansion and emergent empire;
metaphor and figurations of selfhood, knowledge, divinity and nature; the
slavery crisis, Civil War and democratic poetics. Writers include Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass,
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson. Class size: 22
18159 |
LIT 259 American
Literature III |
Peter L'Official |
T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm |
OLIN 101 |
LA D+J |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban
Studies This course explores American literary production
from the late nineteenth century to World War II. In focusing upon this era's
major authors and works, we will closely attend to the formal characteristics
of this period's literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism, and
modernism) while examining many of the principal historical contexts for
understanding the development of American literature and culture (including
debates about immigration, urbanization, industrialization, inequality, racial
discrimination, and the rise of new technologies of communication and mass
entertainment). Writers likely to be encountered include: James, Cather,
Wharton, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Toomer, Hurston, and
Faulkner. Class size:
22