DIVISION OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

LITERATURE PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS: for new students entering in Fall 2000, six courses in literature before moderation, including two consecutive terms in a sequence course and one additional term from the same or a different sequence. Sequence courses are: English Literature I, II, III; U.S. Literature I, II, III; and Comparative Literature I, II, III. For returning students, requirements include six courses before moderation, including one term of a sequence course and one Literature I course.

Returning students who have not yet taken Lit. I should draw their Lit. I course from courses now listed as 100-level courses, with the exception of Lit 123. Note that any student may use language courses or one creative writing course to count toward the six required for moderation. After moderation, students choose seminars at the 300 level, and often tutorials in special topics as well. Students are encouraged to study a language other than English, and study-abroad programs are easily combined with a literature major.

Any course at the 100 level and many courses at the 200 level are open to first-year students.

In this seminar we will read two of Dickens's later novels, taking in the panoramic vision of Victorian society and its discontents he offers in both. In Bleak House (1852) Dickens attacks the vagaries of an antiquated legal system, the complacency of professional philanthropy, and the failings of lawmakers and aristocrats alike to remedy the social ills that plague London and its slums. Little Dorritt (1855) in many ways extends this critique, focusing with even greater intensity upon the precarious health of the nation; much of the novel takes place in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Dickens portrays a world in which all of his characters are more or less imprisoned by circumstances not of their own making. The dark view he took of the social organism as he grew older never prevented Dickens from realizing vital and often profoundly disturbing portraits of the human condition, frequently through the inspired use of caricature. We will explore the rich terrain of these novels, paying particular attention to the novelist's formal experimentation with narration and plot. Frequent papers will be assigned.

One of the most important works of post-war German fiction, Anniversaries was both written and set in New York City, where the East German Johnson was living in exile in the late 1960s. His massive collage of a novel is marked by cross-cutting between two lifetimes worth of memories (including stories from both a childhood spent in East Germany and life under the National Socialists). The book also chronicles life in America between August 1967 and August 1968, a twelve-month span that saw the murders of Robert Kennedy, Che Guevara and Martin Luther King as well as continued U.S. military involvement in Vietnam). All of this is seen through the eyes of the emphatically foreign Gesine Cresspahl, whose outsider status makes her observations all the more acute. Care will be taken to read Johnson's great novel in its historical as well as cultural-historical context, while at the same time developing students' skills in literary analysis. Frequent short papers.

A study, chiefly of five plays by Shakespeare on historical persons and events. Three of the plays are centered in the medieval history of England and in the reigns of the kings who give their names to the plays - Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth. The other principals, known to us from ancient history, give their names to the plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. (Note: the classification of the latter two plays as Histories rather than as Tragedies departs from their arrangement in the First Folio of 1623). The course examines Shakespeare's technique - dramatic construction, characterization, language in all of the plays and considers his themes, such as royalty and rule, the Prince as hero, politics and power, the morality of individual choice and conduct. History as Tragedy will also concern us. Complementary reading in some of the source material for the plays available to Shakespeare.

The course will involve a close reading of the Shakespeare tragedy as well as the Italian novella that was its source. Then students will be introduced to various adaptations and variations, from the neoclassical version of Ducis to the film of Orson Welles. The Rossini and Verdi operas will be seen and discussed. The problems of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on will also be examined, as Shakespeare's work is reinterpreted over the centuries.