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

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

CRN	93434	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 204A
Title	Comparative Literature I: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Professor	Karen Sullivan
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

In the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri damned Ulysses to Hell in his Inferno for having roused his companions to undertake one final voyage to see lands that no man had seen before, yet, before two centuries had passed, another Italian would be praised for having inspired his followers to embark on a similar trip, which would end in the discovery of a New World. As a point of entry into the masterworks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, we will be considering the relationship between the spiritual journey, like that which the Dante pilgrim pursues through the afterlife, and the empirical journey, like that which Christopher Columbus experiences in the Americas. What changes in literature as one moves from crusades, pilgrimages, and the quest for the Holy Grail to voyages of exploration? How does the sense of self mutate as the sense of the world is transformed? Texts to be read include an Irish saint’s life, an Icelandic saga, an Arthurian romance, Dante’s Purgatory, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Rabelais’ Pantagruel, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

CRN	93004	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 250 A
Title	English Literature I
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance literature in England, which emphasizes close readings of some of the major works that make up English literature from Beowulf to Chaucer and Shakespeare. Some of the topics we will explore include the construction of the author (from “Anonymous” to Shakespeare), the British “nation” imagined and partly created by the literature, and the urban, rural, monastic, theatrical levels of society which literature sought to represent. Authors studied, besides Chaucer and Shakespeare, include the Gawain-poet, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, and many others. The course is for new and continuing literature majors who want to develop their critical vocabulary and imagination and to explore the range and depth of English literature while they fulfill program requirements.

CRN	93136	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 250 B
Title	English Literature I
Professor	Nancy Leonard
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm OLIN 205

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	93288	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 252
Title	English Literature III
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 205

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

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	93215	Distribution	C/B
Course No.	LIT 257
Title	Literature of the U.S. I: Cross-Referencing the Puritans
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Wed 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm OLIN 305 Th 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies

Writings from the first three generations of Puritan settlement in seventeenth-century Massachusetts are closely examined not only in relation to each other but also to later American texts bearing persistent traces of Puritan concerns. We will explore such essential Puritan obsessions as the authority of divinely authored Scripture, original sin, predestination, election, free grace, "the city on a hill," and covenanted relations between mankind and God. Our focus will be the contradictory and problematic features of Puritan culture as they find expression in Puritan literature, with its predilection for the plain style, figurative language, the rhetoric of religious emotion, and the construction of the radically individual self. Authors include notable Puritan divines, poets, historians and citizens, as well as later writers, among them Jonathan Edwards, Washington Irving, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Robert Lowell.

CRN	93296	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 258
Title	Literature of the U.S. II
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: American Studies

A study of the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. The syllabus will include not only the writers who have traditionally been identified as the leading figures of the American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe—but also more recently canonized writers like Douglass and Stowe. These writers will spray us outward into an almost unlimited number of related historical topics: the politics of westward expansion, the cult of domesticity, the slavery crisis, and the rise of mass entertainment, to name a few. They will also open up a series of topics that are now commonly associated with critical theory, such as the materiality of language and the nature of unconscious experience. Although all of these fields are interesting in their own right, we will always begin from and return to the experience of literature, on the assumption that this experience is so strange, so variable, and so little understood that it merits our closest attention.