****************LITERATURE SEQUENCE COURSES************

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

CRN	92420	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	LIT 204
Title	Comparative Literature A: Ancient Literature from Gilgamesh to Socrates
Professor	Alan Zeitlin
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

This course will follow the evolution of the literature of the ancient world, from its beginnings in Assyria, Egypt and Babylon to its great flowering in classical Greece. Our focus will be on the figure of the hero, a being who is not quite either mortal or divine, and the tragic relationship of this figure to the gods and to human society. The problem of the hero lies at the heart of the great epics and tragic dramas produced by the ancient world, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, several books of the Bible, Homer's Iliad, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and the Oepipus plays of Sophocles. We will consider all these works and others, and will end with the philosophic hero created by Plato in the person of Socrates.

CRN	92133	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 204B
Title	Comparative Literature II: Early Modern Literature
Professor	Catherine Liu
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 304

This course will cover the period in which modern Europe was created out of the ruins of its former self. By the 1560s the heroic ages of humanism and religious reform were over. What replaced them was a time of skepticism, religious civil war, realpolitik, civility, and the rise of science. Early modernity in Europe will be explored in terms of the process of Secularization; the class will seek to understand the consequences of such a crisis of representation in terms of literary developments and literary culture. We will also explore ways in which the Enlightenment, and the uncompromising rationality, upon which the philosophes insisted, inspired both revolution and reaction. Readings will include Cervantes, (Don Quixote, part 1), Machiavelli (The Prince), LaFayette (The Princesse de Clèves), Descartes (Discourse on Method, Meditations), Montaigne (Excerpts from Essays), Voltaire (Philosophical Letters, Candide), Rousseau (excerpts from Emile), Sade (Philosophy in the Boudoir), Kant ("What is Enlightenment?") We will also be reading from works by Sigmund Freud, and the Frankfurt School sociologists Adorno, and Horkheimer to understand how the issues of secularism and its discontents continue to shape critical problems in the twentieth-century.

CRN	92116	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 250 A
Title	English Literature I
Professor	Nancy Leonard
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

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.

CRN	92027	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 251
Title	English Literature II
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 201

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 novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers. Fulfills program requirement as explained in note at beginning of Literature Program courses.

CRN	92108	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 252
Title	English Literature III
Professor	Fiona Wilson
Schedule	Tu 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 306 Fri 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 204

English Literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Blake and Shelley's poetry and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to modernist writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Some attention to contemporary and to colonial and postcolonial writers in English.

CRN	92088	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 258
Title	Literature of the U.S. II
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Wed Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: American 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. Primary attention in this course will be given to works by Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, with intellectual pre-context provided by reference to the Boston Puritans, to Jonathan Edwards, and to Ralph Waldo Emerson. An even longer continuity will be suggested by the inclusion at the term's end of one or two works by William Faulkner. Thus the course will afford an introductory study of varieties of symbolism in the literature of the United States.

CRN	92120	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 259
Title	Literature of the U.S. III
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies

In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by analyzing the relationship between a series of literary movements-realism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism-and a series of epochal historical events: among them, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the corporation, the Indian Wars, imperialism, the "New Woman," new technologies, the birth of modern consumerism, the trauma of World War I, anxiety over immigration, and the various hedonisms of the so-called "Jazz Age." While writing (and rewriting) this macro-narrative with our left hands, we will be writing a micro-narrative with our right hands, in which we attend not to vast social panoramas but to the moment-to-moment unfoldings of each writer's art. Some of the writers: Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Carlos Williams.