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

CRN	94222	Distribution	B/C / * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 204A
Title	Comparative Literature I: The Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Professor	Karen Sullivan
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

When Virgil's hero Aeneas deserts his beloved Dido in order to fulfill his destiny to found Rome, he establishes the oppositions around which many of the major works of medieval and Renaissance literature would orient themselves. Is civic duty to be preferred to individual love, as Virgil is usually read as suggesting? Is the straight path of epic to be chosen over the wandering itinerary of romance? Are the transcendent truths of Empire and Church to be pursued over the immediate experiences of private life? Medieval literature, with its idealization of courtly ladies and knights errant, is often seen as taking the side of Dido, while Renaissance literature, with itsself-conscious return to antique ideals, is usually said to champion Aeneas. With this framework in mind, we will read Virgil's Aeneid, St. Augustine's Confessions, two Arthurian romances, Dante's Inferno, and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, among other texts.

CRN	94300	Distribution	B * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 204C
Title	Comparative Literature III: Romanticism to Modernity
Professor	Thomas Keenan
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 203

This course examines the peculiar and perplexing Euro-American 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? How do actions and obligations emerge and change out of encounters in language? How does what we think or know get linked with what we do, if it does? And how does language sustain or bear with non-human others: ideas, the dead, memories, and so on? Readings from Wordsworth, Keats, Mary Shelley, Kleist, Goethe, Flaubert, Henry James, Baudelaire, Kafka, Rilke, and Mallarme.

CRN	94152	Distribution	B/C * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 250
Title	English Literature I
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 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 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	94155	Distribution	B/C * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 252
Title	English Literature III
Professor	R. Cole Heinowitz
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 308

This course explores developments in English literature from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century--a period marked by the effects of the French Revolution, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, the trauma of two world wars, the development of regional identities within Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of "Englishness" in a global context. Beginning with "Romantics" and ending with "Moderns," we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of England and Britain; and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. Readings may include works by Scott, Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, George Eliot, Dickens, Carroll, Wells, Kipling, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Beckett, and others.

CRN	94101	Distribution	B/C * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 257
Title	Literature of the U.S. I: Cross-Referencing the Puritans
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Wed Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 205

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	94299	Distribution	B/C * Lit in English
Course No.	LIT 259
Title	Literature of the U.S. III
Professor	Mat Johnson
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am – 12:50 pm PRE 101

Cross-listed: American Studies

In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by working out 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 unfolding of each writer’s art. Authors include Twain, Crane, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Millay, and Faulkner.