CRN

94002

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 2101

Title

Myth/Tale/Story

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

Schedule

Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 301

As the anthropologist Malinowski has written, myths are "a special class of stories, regarded as sacred...stories [that] live not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality." It is the purpose of this course to demonstrate how myths have been recycled as literary art and how many of the greatest stories by modern masters--from Melville to Kafka--have tapped into the great myths of the past. But between those myths and the modern short story lies the vast, unchartered region of the tale--the oral tradition of story-telling. "The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales," wrote Walter Benjamin, who argued that "the fairy tale taught mankind...to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits." We will explore these mysterious waters first by reading some of Ovid's Metamorphoses, followed by The Golden Ass of Apuleius, selections from The Decameron of Boccaccio, and fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and others, before tracing their residual presence in the work of modern masters, both male and female. Some of the papers assigned will give students an opportunity to write their own tales if they wish.

CRN

94201

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2104

Title

Joseph Conrad and the Representation of Imperialism

Professor

Frederic Grab

Schedule

Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 202

The course will focus on Heart of Darkness, but will also include such novels as Lord Jim and Nostromo. We will explore a variety of critical approaches to the texts, and will also investigate their political and social contexts. Some reading in the theory of "Third World" discourse, and at least one novel in which the Empire writes back: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (Sudan).

CRN

94001

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2106

Title

Lyric Modes

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

Schedule

Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 309

An introduction to some of the verse paradigms that make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world--the ballad, the sonnet, blank verse, nonsense verse, the ode, the song, the dramatic monologue, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum, etc. Students will learn how to read and write metrical verse by writing exercises in these forms, and by memorizing and reciting some classical poems as well. A particular concern will be the relation between meter and the speaking voice, but we will also consider different kinds of meter (accentual/syllabic, accentual, syllabic, and sprung rhythm). Still another concern will be the kinds of trope that distinguish classical (figurative) from modernist (elliptical) poetry.

CRN

94005

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

CLAS 214

Title

Catastrophe / Apocalypse

Professor

William Mullen

Schedule

Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm LC 206

Cross listed: Classical Studies, History and Philosophy of Science Religion

See Classical Studies section for description.

CRN

94314

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

ITAL 214

Title

Possible Worlds, Imaginary Places, Great Conspiracies, and Anomalous Sciences

Professor

Carlo Zei

Schedule

Mon 4:00 pm - 5:20 pm OLIN 102

Wed 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Italian

See Italian section for description.

CRN

94039

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

LIT 2141

Title

Medieval Theology

Professor

Karen Sullivan

Schedule

Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 202

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will study the tradition of medieval Christian theology from its scriptural origins to its final efflorescence, with some consideration of its continuing influence upon the Catholic Church today. How can one establish the existence of God? How can one comprehend the existence of evil in a world supposedly governed by providence? What is the relationship between the humanity and the divinity of Christ, between the body and the soul, between our own earthly and spiritual lives? We will consider how medieval thinkers sought to make sense of the world around them through theological inquiry, as well as how they thought they might improve or transcend this world. Authors to be read will include Saint Paul, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Jean Gerson.

CRN

94520

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2142

Title

The Fiction of Nineteenth-Century American Women

Professor

Laura Henigman

Schedule

Mon Wed 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender Studies

American fiction writing in the nineteenth century was, arguably, dominated by the "scribbling women" authors derided by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as sentimental genres flooded the marketplace. We will begin with a look at the major examples in this genre (primarily Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin together with other examples in the important anthology, Hidden Hands), attending to the scholarly debate about how these novels functioned in nineteenth-century culture: did the sentimental help inscribe (and circumscribe) women's roles, or could it provide a platform for a critical stance toward reigning gender ideologies? Then we will investigate the ways in which nineteenth-century women writers experimented with fictional genres to explore other possibilities for women's roles and women's sexuality, through variations on the novel of the "fallen woman" (Foster's The Coquette, Wharton's The House of Mirth) and experiments with voice (Spofford, "The Amber Gods," Stoddard, "Lemorne vs. Huell," Alcott, "Behind the Mask" and "Hospital Sketches," Chopin, "The Storm" and other short stories, Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Stein, "Melanctha"). Along the way, we will look at nineteenth-century American women's attempts to theorize womanhood (Catharine Beecher's "The Peculiar Responsibilities of the American Woman," Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Eighty Years and More and The Woman's Bible, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, and Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health).

CRN

94476

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2181

Title

The Informal Essay

Professor

M Mark

Schedule

Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 305

Dr. Johnson called the essay "a loose sally of the mind," and at first glance his barb seems accurately aimed. The informal essay, that most intimate of genres, sometimes resembles conversation with an articulate, companionable, opinionated friend. The writer draws readers in, confides in them, creates the impression of give and take. Readers surrender to the pleasures of digression and indulge in leisurely rambles through a well-stocked mind. In this course we'll consider the art and craft behind that illusion of artlessness. Students will write essays in a number of keys-from reminiscence to meditation to rant- and read masters of the form: Michel de Montaigne, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, E.M. Cioran, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Natalia Ginzburg, Roland Barthes, Carlos Fuentes, James Baldwin, Angela Carter, Gore Vidal.

CRN

94534

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

CLAS 223

Title

Comedy and its Problems from Aristophanes to Sam Shepherd

Professor

Alan Zeitlin

Schedule

Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 OLIN 201

Cross listed: Classical Studies, Theater

See Classical Studies section for description.

CRN

94268

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 223

Title

Cultural Reportage

Professor

Peter Sourian

Schedule

Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 309

For the self-motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. The course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, and by permission of the instructor, but not restricted to majors.

CRN

94017

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

LIT 231

Title

Florence

Professor

Karen Sullivan

Schedule

Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

In 1527 Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, as an aside in a letter about a local political conflict, "I love my country more than my very soul." What was it about Florence, Machiavelli's "country," that brought him to value it more than his immortal being? What was it about Florence of the late medieval, early modern age that not only produced such a feeling, but allowed it to be expressed? The course begins with a reading of Machiavelli's history of Florence and the political treatises that brought him such notoriety. Dante's ambiguous writings about the land from which he was exiled, Coluccio Salutati's vision of civic humanism, and Botticelli's critique of his city's politics in his paintings will be considered, as well as the major intellectual movements that originated in Florence, as reflected by the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, da Vinci, Vasari, and the neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino.

CRN

94521

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2313

Title

Varieties of American Autobiography

Professor

Laura Henigman

Schedule

Tu Th 8:30 am - 9:50 am OLIN 204

Cross-listed: American Studies

This course will examine autobiographical writing in America. Colonial autobiographical genres (diaries, spiritual relations, spiritual autobiographies) all demand that the discipline of self-examination be subjected to a communal standard; Franklin's Autobiography and nineteenth-century examples establish a myth of the self-fashioned American individual as the basis for democratic society. Finally, twentieth-century writers experiment with the autobiographical form in order to bring that relationship into question. Readings will include such works as Anne Bradstreet's "To Her Children," John Woolman's Diary, Shepard's Confessions, Jonathan Edwards's "Personal Narrative"; Franklin's Autobiography, Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Thoreau's Walden, Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Henry Adams's Education; and Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, John Neihart's Black Elk Speaks; Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood; Studs Terkel's American Dreams, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, Mailer's Armies of the Night, Frank Conroy's Stop-Time.

CRN

94489

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

LIT 238

Title

Modern African Fiction

Professor

Chinua Achebe

Schedule

Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: AADS, MES

Related interest: French Studies

The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of modern African literature. This course will introduce this new writing through a few key texts in its fiction. Works written originally in French or Arabic will be read in their English translations. The course will relate the literature, wherever appropriate to Africa's past traditions as well as its contemporary reality. The authors to be studied include Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, Ferdinand Oyono, Amos Tutuola, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tayeb Salih.

CRN

94020

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 276B

Title

Chosen Voices: Jewish Authors

Professor

Elizabeth Frank

Schedule

Wed 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm OLIN 303

Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 303

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

The course surveys the contribution of European and North American Jewish writing to twentieth-century literature. We will examine various works by Jewish writers and discuss whatever questions come up, most particularly questions about Jewish identity and stereotypes, mythology, folk wisdom, humor, history, culture, and relation to language. Jewish participation in literary modernism will be explored as well. The reading list includes Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Henry Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick and Natalia Ginzburg.

CRN

94203

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3108

Title

Marx, Freud, Nietzsche

Professor

Frederic Grab

Schedule

Wed 8:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 310

Cross-listed: German Studies

"The first book of Marx's Das Kapital," writes Michel Foucault, "is an exegesis of `value'; all Nietzsche is an exegesis of a few Greek words; Freud, the exegesis of all those unspoken phrases that support and at the same time undermine our apparent discourse, our fantasies, our dreams, our bodies, Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has become the modern form of criticism." We will study representative works by these three masters of the "school of suspicion" (Ricoeur), along with selected contemporary criticisms.

CRN

94519

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3124

Title

New Worlds: American Encounters with the Self and Others

Professor

Laura Henigman

Schedule

Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 107

Cross-listed: American Studies

From colonial times to the present, the North American continent has been a stage for contacts among many cultures and peoples -- European, native American, African. We will examine the impact of this theme on American literature, through particular attention to the linked motifs of the journey and the intercultural encounter. What does it mean to encounter an other? Does the journey motif facilitate the reporting of that encounter with a different person, or simply turn the other into a convenient mirror of the self? Does travel into and encounter with the new expand the self or drive it back inward? Some

colonial texts, which establish a variety of possible paradigms for intercultural contact -- captivity, conquest, accommodation, and acculturation -- will set our terms. Works here will include texts in English and in translation from Spanish and Nahuatl, with selections from such authors as Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Diaz, Mary Rowlandson, Olaudah Equiano, John Smith, and William Bradford. Then we will look at an enlightenment attempt to codify the meaning of the American landscape and diverse American populations in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. We will spend the rest of the semester examining works of fiction that employ the journey motif to explore issues of identities, asking the question, what are the possibilities for meaningful contact and understanding between peoples? Books may include James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: Herman Melville, Typee; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Willa Cather, The Professor's House; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; and the science fiction of William Gibson. Selected works of literary criticism and cultural theory will be consulted along the way as well.

CRN

94272

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3202

Title

Media Theory

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Integrated Arts

The seminar will study some central texts in contemporary media theory, beginning with McLuhan's Understanding Media and Derrida's Of Grammatology. On the basis of these divergent notions of the relation between humanity and its mediating devices, we will explore a variety of theoretical approaches to the definition and interpretation of media and new media, touching on privacy and publicity, surveillance and voyeurism, truth and persuasion, photo opportunities and the 'aesthetics of disappearance,' life and death online, and memory and real-time communication. Authors to be read include Paul Virilio (War and Cinema, The Vision Machine), Avital Ronell (The Telephone Book), Friedrich Kittler (Grammophone Film Typewriter), Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media), Samuel Weber (Mass Mediauras), the Nettime Reader (Read Me!), Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen), Richard Dienst (Still Life in Real Time), and others.

CRN

94012

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 328

Title

Ideology and Political Commitment in Modern Literature

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: French Studies, German Studies

In this course we examine how political ideas and beliefs, be they to the left, the right or of the center, are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, T. Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Nervda, and others are analyzed for their ideological content, depth of conception, method of presentation and the artistry with which these writers synthesize politics and literature into a permanent aesthetic experience. The class will also try to determine what constitutes the borderline between art and propaganda and address the question whether it is possible to genuinely enjoy a work of literature whose political orientation is at odds with our own convictions. The discussion will be supplemented with examples drawn from other art forms such as music, painting and film.

CRN

94256

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

LIT 331

Title

Translation Workshop

Professor

William Weaver

Schedule

Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 309

Although some knowledge of a foreign language is necessary, this is not a language course, and no particular proficiency is required. An interest in language, especially English, is the most important thing. Students will be expected to work on some translation project (preferably prose); but their work will serve chiefly as a basis for the discussion of general problems of translation, its cultural significance, and the relationship between translation and creative writing. Class limited to 12 students.

CRN

94197

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 333

Title

Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Professor

Bradford Morrow

Schedule

Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 101

The diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed by innovative contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. In this course we will closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last quarter century in order to begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of work by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, and others. One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

CRN

94200

Distribution

A/B

Course No.

LIT 3360

Title

Black Aesthetics

Professor

Michelle Wilkinson

Schedule

Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 306

Cross-listed: AADS

Stuart Hall asked, "What is this 'black' in Black Popular Culture?" This seminar asks not only "what is the black in black aesthetics" but what is the aesthetics. Exploring the major debates and definitions of black aesthetics as a concept for artists and scholars throughout the African Diaspora and using questions of genre as our guiding principle, we will interrogate the claims for and against black aesthetics in fields as diverse as poetry, music and visual art. Readings may include Zora Neale Hurston, Edouard Glissant, Richard Powell and VeVe Clark. Limited to 10 students.

CRN

94208

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 364

Title

Shakespeare Seminar

Professor

Nancy Leonard

Schedule

Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm ASP 302

The new London of 1595-1610 was enormously expanded in size, complexity, aspiration, and bustle; plays were constantly in production and Shakespeare's new plays co-existed with rival productions in many theaters. Six Shakespeare plays will be studied which especially evoke the anxieties and excitements of social change, historical self-awareness and dramatic ambition associated with the growth of London: The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Henry V, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. These plays, together with a few of Shakespeare's sonnets, will be studied with and against other texts of city life: domestic melodrama, pamphlet literature, "she-tragedy," jokebook and sermon. For Upper College students with an interest in literature and history.

CRN

94018

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

LIT 371

Title

Women in Medieval Literature

Professor

Karen Sullivan

Schedule

Fr 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm LC 120

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will consider the representation of women in western letters from late antiquity to the Renaissance. Condemned as the gateway of the devil, women were also celebrated as the bride of Christ. Viewed as more susceptible to carnal temptations, women were also seen as more capable of spiritual ascent. What does it mean to be a woman at a time when the humility, passivity, and long-suffering associated with this sex constituted religious ideals, when Christ is occasionally envisioned as a woman, and when the human soul is perceived as feminine? To what extent did the courtly discourse which emerged in the twelfth century, positing women as the idealized object of a man's love, resonate with the concurrent cult of the Virgin Mary? To what extent did it resonate, instead, with the coarser, allegedly misogynist literature of the fabliaux? How did women authors situate themselves within the competing ideologies of the clergy, the aristocracy, and the emerging bourgeoisie? Readings will be from Scripture, Church Fathers, saints' lives, men and women troubadours, Arthurian romance, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Marguerite de Navarre, and the trial of Joan of Arc.

CRN

94528

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 373

Title

"The Objectivists": George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi

Professor

Ann Lauterbach

Schedule

Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 302

One significant branch of American poetic practice followed from Ezra Pound's focus on the "radiant details" of Imagism, and William Carlos Williams' commitment to the local and demotic ("no ideas but in things"). This group of poets, however, went beyond either Pound or Williams, to concentrate on the material values, both aural and visual, of language, testing its descriptive powers, and wanting to make poems that were, in themselves, things, objects. Their investigations lead to profound questions about the relations between poetry and politics (Oppen), subjectivity and objectivity, private and public language, and at another extreme, the poem's relation to music and other texts (Zukovsky). Although still viewed with skepticism among conservative critics, their work has had powerful consequences for contemporary poetry and poetics. Along with close readings of their work, we will address questions raised by the historical context in which they wrote (roughly 1930s- 1970s), the nature of a poetic "school", and their individual legacies. Weekly readings, response papers, and one term project.

CRN

94010

Distribution

A/B

Course No.

LIT 3741

Title

Virginia Woolf

Professor

Deirdre d'Albertis

Schedule

Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 303

Cross-listed: Gender Studies

In this seminar we will study Woolf's novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941), in the context of two distinct periods of innovation and conflict in twentieth-century literary culture. The first period, beginning "on or about December 1910" as Woolf memorably suggested, was the formation of the Bloomsbury circle, in particular, and English modernism, in general. What makes Woolf a modernist? How did her interactions with other members of the literary avant-garde (Forster, Eliot, even Joyce and Mansfield), as well as artists and thinkers associated with Bloomsbury, shape her experiments in fiction? The second period, following the women's movement in England and America of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, was the introduction into the academy of feminist literary criticism. Why did Woolf's novels and essays, especially "A Room of One's Own," become canonical texts of late twentieth-century feminism? In examining the historical reception of Woolf's writings we will struggle to come to grips with that larger-than-life figure critic Brenda Silver recently referred to as "Virginia Woolf, Icon."

CRN

94274

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 420

Title

Kafka and His Neighbors

Professor

Norman Manea

Schedule

Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

The course will start with some of Kafka's letters, diaries and fiction and will carry on with the diffusion of the kafkaesque into the absurdity and cruelty of the history of our times. The literary heritage of Central and Eastern Europe, Kafka's "neighborhood", will be studied through the work of such writers as Musil, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Ionesco, Kundera, Canetti, Danilo Kis. An examination of these books for their literary value and as a reflection of the cultural landscape and the tumult of history, as the best introduction to Central Europe's creativity, its genius and its tragedy.

CRN

94273

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 430

Title

Contemporary Masters: Saul Bellow

Professor

Norman Manea

Schedule

Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

Considered "the most important writer in English in the second half of the twentieth century: Saul Bellow is, as one of his commentators wrote, "both timeless and ruthlessly contemporary." His prose displays an uncommon gift for bringing together the mind and the body, the soul and the intellect, the chaos, contradictions and dynamism of modern life. Honored with many prestigious American and European literary awards, Mr. Bellow received, in 1976, the Nobel Prize for literature "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." We will study some of his most famous novels, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, in order to assess his literary originality and moral concerns, the inter-play of the comic and the melancholy, of social and private life, and his uncommon cultural stature. Mr. Bellow will meet the class several times during the semester, and will be in residence for a period of time in October. Mr. Bellow will give a reading to the College.