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

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. Readings from Greek literature will also include lyric poetry (focusing on Sappho and Pindar), and Attic drama (e.g., Aristophane's Frogs and Clouds, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae). Readings from the Latin corpus will include epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry (e.g. Vergil, Horace, Catullus, Seneca). Concurrently, we will be examining the ongoing critique of literature from the fragments of early Greek philosophers (e.g. Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus), through Plato and Aristotle, to Cicero and Horace. Our twofold aim will be to develop an understanding of all these texts in their original context and to consider how they set the stage for subsequent developments in western literature and criticism. All readings in English. Class size: 22

18155

LIT 204B

Comparative Literature II:

1600 - 1800

Joseph Luzzi

M W 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 201

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

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

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

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

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