(Historical studies in the English, American and Comparative literature traditions are organized into three part sequences)

This course examines the peculiar and perplexing European literary transformation loosely named Romanticism to Modernity. Reading selected texts by a limited number of authors very carefully, we will emphasize the relation between the self and others, as it happens in language: what is it to meet others in words? We will also pursue the problem, posed intensively in these texts, of linking what we think or know with what we do, of the relation between thought and action. Readings from Kleist, Goethe, Hoelderlin, Keats, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ponge, Rilke, and Celan. Frequent writing assignments and detailed, intensive, readings of texts.

An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance literature in England, which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of critical vocabulary and imagination, the discovery of the newly important and long-respected works which make up English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Some topics which we will explore include the construction of the author (from "Anonymous" to Shakespeare), the British "nation" imagined and partly created by the literature, the utopian and actual societies - urban, rural, monastic, theatrical - which literature sought to represent. Authors studied, besides Chaucer and Shakespeare, include the Gawain-poet, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and Julian of Norwich. The course is for new and continuing literature majors who want to explore the range and depth of English literature while they fill program requirements.

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

This course is the second in a sequence of courses that explore major authors and issues in American literature, from its Puritan origins to the twentieth century. Authors studied include Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Faulkner and others of the American Renaissance. Each course in the series has its separate integrity, but the three courses together make a coherent sequence, and any two or all three may be taken without disturbing overlap.