This course considers the culture and, especially, the literature of Byzantium, from the city's founding in 330 AD to its fall to the Turks in 1453. We will be studying writings by the Greek Church Fathers, chronicles on the Byzantines by Greeks, Muslims, and westerners, and treatments of such important historical events as the iconoclast controversy and the Crusades, in addition to the principal works of medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry from this region. While our focus will be upon the city nowadays known as Istanbul and its surrounding territories, we will also be examining the Byzantine presence in the Balkans and parts of Italy, Russia, and northern Africa. We will end by contemplating the influence of what W. B. Yeats calls "the holy city of Byzantium" upon later civilizations.

CRN	90059	Distribution	A/B
Course No.	LIT 2136 / IA
Title	Shakespeare on Film
Professor	Nancy Leonard
Schedule	Fri 10:30 am - 12:50 pm PRE Thu 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm PRE

Cross-listed: Film, Integrated Arts

The history of Shakespeare films unites the development of cinematic art, acting style and changing understandings of Shakespeare. Films are powerful productions of Shakespeare, and many stand as fascinating classics as well as versions of today's cultural understandings. We will read several Shakespeare tragedies, a comedy and a history, and grasp them in intense dialogue with important films of the plays. Questions to be raised include the influence of a director's style, the role of montage, poetic vs. dramatic conceptions of action, the nature of realism, the role of acting styles, and the contrasts between classic and contemporary films. Films will be screened from different national traditions, and are listed here by the plays to be studied: Macbeth (Welles, Polanski, Kurosawa), Hamlet (Olivier, Kozintsev, Almereyda), King Lear (Godard, Brook, Kurosawa), Romeo and Juliet (Zefferelli and Baz Luhrman) A Midsummer Night's Dream (Max Reinhardt) and a film of Henry IV or V (Olivier, Welles or Branagh). Lecture/discussion.

CRN	90417	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2146
Title	Writing from Place
Professor	Susan Rogers
Schedule	Tu Th 4:30 pm - 6:50 pm OLIN 203

This course is for students who want to develop both their creative writing and their analytic thinking through writing essays that begin in response to place. In these personal essays, place--a house, a city, the woods--will serve as a starting point to explore how place shapes and influences our thinking. In the tradition of the personal essay, these essays will be both imaginative and analytical. Through reading contemporary essayists whose work is place-based students will gain an appreciation for the form and the imaginative possibilities of the essay. But emphasis will rest on the student's own writings, which will be critiqued in a workshop format with an eye for the craft of the work. This course is for students with experience in writing workshops, but those who bring knowledge and learning from other disciplines (especially history, geography, biology) are encouraged to apply. This course was filled by portfolio submission in May.

CRN	90075	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 223
Title	Workshop in Cultural Reportage
Professor	Peter Sourian
Schedule	Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 310

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	90032	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 227
Title	Ideology and Political Commitment in Modern Literature
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 202

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

CRN	90035	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2305
Title	Mapping African-American Literature
Professor	Michelle Wilkinson
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: AADS, MES

In this survey of African American Literature, we will read from a variety of genres and examine representative as well as overlooked texts. Charting the literary geographies in each text, we will examine the representations of home, community and the experience of migration. Though writers may refer to specific physical locations, like Jean Toomer's Sparta, Georgia, literal or imagined geographies - like "the North" - function metaphorically and are invested with cultural meanings. As such, we will supplement our readings of poetry, fiction, drama and autobiographical narratives with other expressions of this theme in music, film, visual art and photography. Possible authors are Rudolph Fisher, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry and literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin.

CRN	90048	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2306
Title	William Faulkner: Race, Text and Southern History
Professor	Donna Ford Grover
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 306

Cross list: MES & American Studies

2 credits One of America's greatest novelists, William Faulkner was deeply rooted in the American South. Unlike other writers of his generation who viewed America from distant shores, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region. From this intensely intimate vantage point, he was able to portray the south and all of its glory and shame. Within Faulkner's narratives slavery and its aftermath remain the disaster at the heart of American History. In this course we will read Faulkner's major novels, poetry, short stories as well as film scripts. We will also read biographical material and examine the breath of current Faulkner literary criticism. This is a two-credit course that will end on October 24^th. Students may earn 2 additional credits as an Independent Study.

CRN	90067	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2401
Title	Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am ASP 302

The unities and contrasts, pleasure, and meanings of this rich collection. Study of Chaucer's language and some background readings (e.g. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), but primarily an examination of a great poem. No previous knowledge of Middle English required.

CRN	90051	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	LIT 2402
Title	Virgil and Rome
Professor	Alan Zeitlin
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

Reading in translation of all Virgil's major works -- the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid -- and of other classical texts revealing the literary and historical world in which he moved: Hesiod, Homer, Euripides, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, Livy, and Horace. The largest part of the course will be taken up with the Aeneid and the tensions between schools of interpretation of it. Does it glorify the order which Augustus created out of a century of Roman civil war, and thus, with him, look back triumphantly on the growth of Rome from a small city to a world

empire? Or does it subvert that order by implying that it was won at too great a human cost? Is some other more

inclusive reading possible? Since many of the Aeneid's most telling effects come from Virgil's variations on his Homeric

prototypes, students will be expected to be familiar with translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey by the time class

discussion of the Aeneid begins.

CRN	90024	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 241
Title	The Novel before the Novel
Professor	Frederic Grab
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 303

The novel has traditionally been a genre that resists definition---hence the difficulty in assigning to it either a beginning or an end. In fact, as the Soviet theorist M. M. Bakhtin puts it, "the novel, from the very beginning, developed as a genre that had as its core a new way of conceptualizing time." We will date this "very beginning" in the 2^nd century C.E., and will read such early novels as Daphnis And Chloe (Longus), An Ethiopian Story (Heliodorus), Alexander Romance (Pseudo-Callisthenes), and The Golden Ass (Apuleius)---prose narratives that abound in adventure, mystery, and eroticism. The course will conclude with Rabelais' carnivalesque novel of the 16th century, Gargantua And Pantagruel. In addition, we will study two seminal works of novelistic theory, Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination And The Theory Of The Novel by Georg Lukacs.

CRN	90007	Distribution	A/B
Course No.	LIT 248
Title	The Epic
Professor	Frederic Grab
Schedule	Tu Th 8:30 am - 9:50 am OLIN 307

Cross listed: Classical Studies

The epic has been defined as "a formal composition which has drawn into itself the poetry of past ages through many levels of cultural experience: mythical, legendary, often historical, and also contemporary, with fictional details supplied by its final creator." The course will study the variety of cultural experience represented in the following works: Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia), Odyssey, (Greece), Ramayana (India), Sundiata and Gassire's Lute (Africa), The Tain (Ireland), The Elder Edda (Iceland), Song of Igor's Campaign (Russia), and others if time permits. Weekly papers.

CRN	90087	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2482
Title	Narratives of Suffering
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 202

The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the heart of many of the world's great stories (the Odyssey, Job, the Gospels, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost) and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of one's life?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirtsleeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers's story. Why? Our investigations will begin at this point. The range of reference will be broad, encompassing Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Dostoevsky, among others, but the course will be centered around texts drawn from the U.S. literary tradition, including Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Owen Chase's account of a whale's destruction of his ship, William Wells Brown's slave narrative, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, the short fiction of Stephen Crane and Jack London, and novels by Nathanael West, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Dorothy Allison.

CRN	90066	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 249
Title	Arthurian Romance
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

A study of the variety of concerns, meanings, and pleasures in medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights. Readings in the Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Layamon's Brut, Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Tale of the Death of King Arthur, and Spenser's Fairie Queene.

CRN	90378	Distribution	D
Course No.	GER / LIT 250
Title	Verdi, Opera, and Politics: The German Connection
Professor	Franz Kempf
Schedule	Th 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: German Studies, Italian Studies

Verdi's third favorite author, after Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, was the German dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The operas Giovanna d'Arco, Joan of Arc (1845), I masnadieri, The Robbers (1847), Luisa Miller (1849), and Don Carlo (1867) are more or less loose adaptations of four of Schiller's historical dramas. Verdi (in his own times) and Schiller (in the nineteenth century) became immensely popular symbolic figures in their countries' politics, especially for the blend of liberalism and nationalism that lead to unification. We will compare the libretti of the operas and the texts of the dramas against this political background, and examine features of the dramas that may have drawn Verdi to Schiller, the high rhetoric, for instance, the seemingly disjointed (in the Brechtian sense) epic structure, the intertwining of idealism and realism, the hauntingly tragic situations that arise when great powers (society, state, church, destiny) clash with private passions of the revolutionary individual. While expert knowledge of opera is neither expected nor provided, we will also explore issues related to the adaptation of one artistic medium, drama in words, to another, drama in music. A conflict of a different kind occupies center stage in Verdi: A Novel of the Opera (1924) by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel (Prague, 1890-Beverley Hills, 1945). Woven into the narrative fabric is a fictional encounter between Verdi and Wagner in Venice in 1883. Werfel introduces the two as antithetical figures in musical and cultural terms, representing (roughly) the natural simplicity of the South as opposed to the cerebral sophistication of the North. The splendidly written novel became an immediate bestseller and Werfel, who also translated Verdi libretti into German, helped usher in a Verdi renaissance in Germany in the twentieth century. Taught in English. Tutorial in German can be arranged.

CRN	90061	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 261
Title	Growing Up Victorian
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 307

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

Victorian children come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. The readings include nursery rhymes, fairy and folk tales, didactic stories, autobiography, and at least two novels: Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays and Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

CRN	90050	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	LIT 2701/ RUS
Title	Generation "P": The Invention of the 21st Century
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Russian Studies

Generation "P" is a term coined by Viktor Pelevin, one of the most provocative Russian writers today. Does "P" stand for postmodern, post-Soviet, Pelevin, Putin, or just for pun? We are going to examine all kind of "p"ossibilities and "p"aradoxes in the works of Pelevin and other authors, including Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Erofeev, Evgenii Kharitonov, Valeriia Narbikova, Dmitrii Prigov, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatiana Tolstaia, and critical theorists Boris Groys and Mikhail Epstein. Significant attention will be paid to the debate on the "postmodern condition" in Russian culture. Along with literary texts we shall examine some films and music by Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina. Conducted in English.

CRN	90065	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 276B
Title	Chosen Voices: Jewish Authors
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 309 Wed 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

Related Interest: MES

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	90049	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2770
Title	Queer Nations
Professor	Lindsay Watton
Schedule	Tu Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Gender Studies

In this course we will critically examine discourses of

gay/lesbian/transgendered/queer sexualities in novels and memoirs of American writers from the 1950's to the 1990's. We will begin with the emergence of explicitly same-sexed works in the repressive decades following World War II that anticipate the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the mythic birth of Gay Liberation. From the politically charged identity literature of the early 1970's we will trace the (de)volution of what Brad Gooch has called "The Golden Age of Promiscuity" into the apocalypse of AIDS and the current queer generation's attempt to liberate itself from the perceived limits of historical self-awareness. The formative and often exacerbating factors of gender, race, ethnicity and class in the highly contested arena of identity politics and literature will be a concern of the course as will how the writers themselves come to terms with the often conflicting roles of artist and activist. Concurrent trends in the visual arts will also be considered. Authors to be read include James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, Gil Cuadros, Melvin Dixon, Leslie Feinberg, Essex Hemphill, Patricia Highsmith, Larry Kramer, Paul Monette, John Rechy, Sarah Schulman and Edmund White. A film series will accompany the course.

CRN	90438	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 286
Title	Radical Romanticism
Professor	Fiona Wilson
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm PRE 128

British Romanticism may be described as the first counter-cultural movement in the English speaking world. This course explores the poetry, prose, and fiction that announced the radical aesthetics and politics of this era. Students will produce creative and critical responses to works by Blake, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths, Austen, Byron, Keats, the Shelleys, as well as Clare, Smith, and others.