CRN

94160

Distribution

B / *(Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2002

Title

Americans Abroad

Professor

Donna Grover

Schedule

Mon Wed       10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 306

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies

Post World War I was an exciting time for American artists who chose to come of age and discover their own American-ness from other shores.  We will read writers of the so-called “ Lost Generation” including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But in our reexamination of  “The Lost Generation” we will also include expatriate writers best known for their participation in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset.  The African-American presence in Europe, which included the iconic figure Josephine Baker as well as jazz great Louis Armstrong altered this picture in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.  This course looks at a period in which American culture found roots abroad.

 

CRN

94271

Distribution

A/B / *(Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2011

Title

Aesthetics of Narrative

Professor

Nancy Leonard

Schedule

Tu Th            1:30 pm -  2:50 pm       OLIN 310

A study of varieties of modern narrative and the aesthetic questions that shape our attention and involvement. How does a narrative reflect its own telling and give us signs as to where to find—or lose—the author? How does it create sympathy with a self-absorbed teller? Does confusion or hostility sometimes foster narrative involvement? Can a case study also be “literature”? How does literary narrative differ from film narrative? Fictions to be read include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Sigmund Freud’s The Wolf Man, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Film adaptations of Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, and of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, will be screened. Theory of narrative will be drawn from Mikhail Bahktin, Peter Brooks, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Diana Fuss, among others.

 

CRN

94295

Distribution

B/D / *(Lit in English

Course No.

LIT 2116

Title

The Literature of Private Life

Professor

Marina van Zuylen

Schedule

Th                 1:30 pm -  3:50 pm       OLIN 205

Cross-listed: French Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights

The representation of private life in the nineteenth-century French novel coincided with the advent of Realism and culminated in Naturalism.  Novelists not only started to describe the institutions that shaped private life (i.e., marriage, education, religion), but dwelled also on the discrete dramas occurring backstage--the plight of the child (Sand, Francois le champi), the torments of family life (Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet), the ambiguities of marriage (Madame Bovary), the despair of  domesticity (Maupassant's A Woman's Life), the nature of obsession (Zola,  Thérèse Raquin), and the thematization of decadence (Huysmans, A Rebours ). Using as a backdrop influential writings on everyday life (Debord, de Certeau, Vaneigem, Goffman, Lefebvre), this class will examine topics  previously considered too private, too personal to be viewed as literature. Students will also uncover the techniques that helped dramatize these highly subjective conflicts (interior monologue, free indirect discourse, early examples of flow of consciousness). Issues of gender, sexuality, and the role  of women in defining domesticity will be central. In order to situate these texts within a tradition that rethinks the self, the class will start out discussing texts by Locke, Descartes, Kant, Shaftesbury, Marx, Hegel, and Foucault. Students will also read  excerpts from the recent anthology History of Private Life, an invaluable research tool to examine the connection between literature, philosophy, social history, and anthropology.  Taught in English. Students with knowledge of French will read the texts in the original language.

 

CRN

94156

Distribution

B / *(Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2156

Title

Romantic Literature: Writing and British Society, 1780 - 1830

Professor

R. Cole Heinowitz

Schedule

Tu Th            3:00 pm -  4:20 pm       OLIN 309

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars.  The term traditionally used to categorize this literature, “romantic,” is interestingly problematic: throughout the course we will question the assumptions built into this term instead of assuming that we know what it means or taking for granted a series of supposed characteristics of “romantic” literature and art.  We will also explore the extent to which key conflicts in British culture during the “romantic period,” including the founding of the United States, independence movements in the Americas, the development of free trade ideology, and the debates over slavery and colonialism, are still at issue today. The centerpiece of this course is the close reading of poetry. There will also be a strong emphasis on the historical and social contexts of the works we are reading, and on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether “romantic” writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include canonical and non-canonical authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.

 

CRN

94808

Distribution

B/D / *(Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2157

Title

European Short Stories and Novellas

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

Mon Wed   11:30 am – 12:50 pm   OLIN 303

An in-depth study of the difference between the short story, built on figurative techniques closely allied to those employed in poetry which allows the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning in the space of a few pages, and the novella that demands the economory and exactness of a short work while at the same time allowing a fuller concentration and development of both character and plot.  We explore the range and scale of the artistic accomplishments of such masters in these genres as de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kleist Sholem Aleichem, Brecht, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, Borges. (Students who can read in the original language are encouraged to do so.)  Audio/visual materials are used to illuminate the texts.

 

CRN

94301

Distribution

A/C  / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 218

Title

Free Speech

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Mon Wed       3:00 pm -  4:20 pm       OLIN 205

Cross-listed: Human Rights
An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and censorship on the Internet.  The course will examine the ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in ideas about democracy.  What is 'freedom of speech'?  Is there a right to say anything?  We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do with literature.  Why have poetry and fiction always been privileged examples of freedom and its defense?  What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what?  Is an encounter with the fact of language, which belongs to no one and can be appropriated by anyone, at the heart of democracy?  In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will ask about the ways in which the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from a 'literary' experience.  These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, including case studies and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Spivak, Fish, Agamben).  A core course in the Human Rights Program.

 

CRN

94179

Distribution

B/D / * (Humanities)

Course No.

CLAS / LIT 221

Title

From Babel to Brain – The Origin of Language in Western Thought

Professor

Benjamin Stevens

Schedule

Tu Th            10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 201

Where does language come from, and why do languages differ? This course explores the history of Western answers to these questions and their implications for human nature and identity. Topics considered include the role of the divine; whether language is “natural” or “conventional”; linguistic diversity, evolution, and ecology; language acquisition and whether or not “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”; sound, gesture, and symbol; biology, evolutionary theory, and neuropsychology; ethology and zoosemiotics; and language as blessing and curse. Readings include the Biblical account of Babel and related stories; Greek and Roman philosophical speculation; Medieval and Renaissance searches for Adamitic, “perfect”, and “universal” languages; tales of “feral children” and other foundlings; and more recent perspectives on language origins: philological, scientific, critical, and fictional. No prerequisites, but knowledge of languages other than English potentially useful.

 

CRN

94162

Distribution

B/F / * (Practicing Art)

Course No.

LIT 223

Title

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, but not restricted to majors.

 

CRN

94320

Distribution

B / *

Course No.

LIT 2232

Title

Writing the World: Nonfiction Prose

Professor

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Schedule

Th     1:30 pm – 3:50 pm  OLIN 303

This is a course in two skills: learning to make excellent nonfiction prose and learning to see the world around you.  When it comes to the art of nonfiction prose, the emphasis nearly always falls on the personal, and especially on essay and memoir.  In this course, I want to turn our gaze outward and to think about how we write from direct experience, not for the purpose of capturing our reactions but in order to understand the shape of what we have experienced.  Our models will be drawn from history and from the broad category of nonfiction writing that is often, and absurdly, called “current events.”  Our goal will be to become compelling witnesses and makers of acute prose—but our goal will also be art, not journalism.  Students will be expected to write 4-5 pages every week.  

 

CRN

94311

Distribution

B / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 238

Title

Modern African Fiction

Professor

Chinua Achebe

Schedule

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

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies, Human Rights, SRE

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

94128

Distribution

B / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 240

Title

Satire

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

Mon Th         10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 305

This is a two-semester course, divisible. The first semester deals with traditions of satire (humorous social criticism) from ancient times through the renaissance and enlightenment to the late nineteenth century.  Writers include Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Petronius, Machiavelli, Moliere, Voltaire, Swift, Pope, Wilde, Beerbohm). Students, if they choose, will have the opportunity to experiment with satiric forms in two of their three papers.

 

CRN

94161

Distribution

B / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2403

Title

Interrogating Feminism(s)

Professor

Donna Grover

Schedule

Mon Wed       11:30 am - 12:50 pm     OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies

During the 1960s and 1970s a so called “second wave” of feminism emerged.   This movement had many divergent voices and many ideals of feminism.  This course is concerned with the how the many women writers, poets and artists fashioned new ways of self -representation while in an ever changing social and political scene.  We will begin with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.  It was this book that inspired feminists like Betty Friedan, Erica Jong and Germaine Greer to pen their works.  We will also read Audre Lorde, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich and other writers and poets who were a part of this “second wave.’

 

CRN

94305

Distribution

B / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 249

Title

Arthurian Romance

Professor

Mark Lambert

Schedule

Tu Th            10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 203

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 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot, Beroul and Thomas's Romance of Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other works.

 

CRN

94154

Distribution

B / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 2503

Title

Studies in Shakespeare

Professor

Elizabeth Frank

Schedule

Wed Th         1:30 pm -  2:50 pm       OLIN 203

Cross-listed:  Theater

This course will be an intensive examination of selected plays in every genre in which Shakespeare wrote: comedy, tragedy, history and romance.  Although we will remain open to a variety of approaches and questions, we will ground our discussion throughout the semester in the close reading of actual texts.  Plays include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, Henry IV (Parts I and II), Richard III, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

 

CRN

94129

Distribution

B/C / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 261

Title

Growing Up Victorian

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

Tu Th            1:30 pm -  2:50 pm       LC 120

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 Browns Schooldays and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

 

CRN

94433

Distribution

B/D  / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT / GER 270

Title

Rebels with(out) a Cause: Great Works of German Literature

Professor

Franz Kempf

Schedule

Tu Th            10:00 am - 11:20 am     LC 208

A survey of representative works of German literature from the eighteenth century to the present, from Goethe’s Weltschmerz bestseller The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774) to Mother Tongue (1990), a collection of stories by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish-German woman writer. Other authors include: Schiller, Eichendorff, Heine, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Jelinek. Course conducted in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the works in the original.

 

CRN

94157

Distribution

B/C / * (Lit in English)

Course No.

LIT 276

Title

The Holocaust & Literature

Professor

Norman Manea

Schedule

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

Cross-listed:  Human Rights, Jewish Studies

Reading and discussion of selected short fiction and novels by such major writers as Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, W.G Sebald, Aleksandar Tisma, Danilo Kis, and by two Nobel Laureates for literature, I. B. Singer and Imre Kertesz. The Holocaust will be considered in comparison with such other genocides of the twentieth century as the Gulag, communist China and Cambodia and Rwanda etc.  We will debate questions about the boundaries of art incorporating unprecedented cruelty and despair, about literature of extreme situations (the traditional and the more experimental modes of narrative representation).  We will also pay attention to post-Holocaust reality, to the trivialization of tragedy in fashionable, simplistic melodramas of the current mass-media culture or in political-ideological manipulation (especially in former East European socialist countries).