Course	LIT / GER 187 The Ring of the Nibelung
Professor	Franz Kempf
CRN	95018
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:30 -11:50 am OLINLC 118 Fr 12:30 -5:30 pm CAMPUS WEIS
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

A study of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four immense music dramas. A story about “gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants and humans, it has been read and performed as a manifesto for socialism, as a plea for a Nazi-like racialism, as a study of the workings of the human psyche, as forecast of the fate of the world and humankind, as a parable about the new industrial society of Wagner’s time.” As we travel down the Rhine and across the rainbow and on through the underworld, our tour-guides will be Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as well as the anonymous author of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied. Musical expertise neither expected nor provided. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the

libretti in the original.

Course	LIT / GER 199 Kafka: Prague, Politics and the fin-de-siècle
Professor	Franz Kempf
CRN	95017
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLINLC 206
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

Kafka can be read as the chronicler of modern despair, of human suffering in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape. Yet he can also be read as a representative of his era, his “existential anguish” springing from the very real cultural and historical conflicts that agitated Prague at the turn of the century (e.g. anti-Semitism, contemporary theories of sexuality). The course will cover Kafka’s shorter fiction ranging from fragments, parables and sketches to longer, complete tales (e.g. The Judgment, The Metamorphosis), as well as the novels The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika) and excerpts from his diaries and letters. Together they reveal the breath of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the original for extra credit.

Course	LIT 2004 Asian Canons and Cultures
Professor	Gustav Heldt
CRN	95441
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00 – 1:20 pm OLINLC 115
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

An introduction to conceptions of self, society, and the universe as they were formulated in Asia through an intensive engagement with canonical literary, philosophical, and religious texts such as the Analects, Bhagavad Gita, Lotus Sutra, Ramayana, Tale of Genji, and Tao Te Ching. In addition to reading these works in translation, students will be introduced to the characteristics of different classical Asian languages that enabled their distinctive forms of rhetoric and thought.  Fulfills the core course requirement for the Asian Studies program.

Course	LIT 2019 Articulate Sounds: Reading Poetic Texts
Professor	Jeffrey Katz
CRN	95057
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 -5:20 pm OLIN 201
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

It has been said that the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure are like the reasons for anything else in that we can and should reason about them. The aim of this course is to develop close reading & reasoning skills; attention to the sound system of prosody; to grammar and rhetoric; to prominent uses of figurative language; & to the lyric speaker, all toward answering the following questions: *How do we make sense of a poem? *What is the poem designed to do? *What systems and characteristic features are put in place to get this work done? *How is the poem an object of thought, and how an instrument of thinking, and, more generally, “What is poetic knowledge?” “What is the knowledge not obtainable by any other means which is poetical?” “What do we call upon when we call upon poetry?” Presentations and assignments will orient students toward making interpretations of poems based on analysis of the poetic line via detailed scansions and other appropriate notations; discussion of the relationship between meaning and metrical structure; analysis of line openings and endings; the work of metaphor and other figurative language. Readings will include a broad survey of short poems including work of: Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins, Pound, Auden, Oppen, Niedecker, Hejinian, Ashbery. Additional readings in rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics may also be included.

Course	LIT 2020 Literature, Language and Lies: Reading Word by Word
Professor	Francine Prose
CRN	95062
Schedule	Fr 2:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 107
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Throughout history, written language has been used to create masterpieces and to pump out propaganda, to delight and delude, to reveal and obscure the truth. But unless we read closely--word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence--it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference. In this class, we will close-read the short stories of great writers (James and Joyce, Cheever and Chekov, Mansfield and O'Connor, Beckett and Bowles, etc.) as well as this week's issue of The New Yorker and today's copy of the New York Times as we look at the ways in which words are used to convey information and insight, to transmit truth and beauty, and to form and transform our vision of the world.

Course	LIT 210 Major American Poets
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
CRN	95141
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 309
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

American poetry found its own voice in the first half of the 19^th century when Emerson challenged American "scholars" to free themselves from tradition. For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, acknowledged Emerson as a crucial inspiration. Emerson himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, were the first to achieve international fame, but it was in Whitman's poems that a distinctively American voice was first heard--a voice that was both oracular and plain-spoken. At the same time, the oddly metered, introspective poems of Emily Dickinson, mostly unpublished during her lifetime, spoke in a New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American. Then, only thirty years after her death, the powerful modern voices of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, and Hart Crane began to be heard.  We will read selected poems by each of these, and we will also give equal time to Frost, the great contrarian poet who was dismissed by some as anti-modern but is now acknowledged as one of the greatest.

Course	LIT 2140 Domesticity and Power
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	95032
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 107
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Related interest: Africana Studies

Many American women writers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries used the domestic novel to make insightful critiques of American society and politics. These women who wrote of the home and of marriage and detailed the chatter of the drawing room were not merely recording the trivial events of what was deemed to be their “place.” The course begins with Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). We will also read the novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fausett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and others.

Course	LIT 215 Victorian Essays & Detectives
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	95046
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 107
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

Essays long and short by Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry Mayhew and Oscar Wilde addressing Victorian issues such as crime, art and science. Detective stories and novels by Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and other inventors of the detective genre. The syllabus will emphasize such pairings as Thomas Henry Huxley writing on the scientific method, and Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, Pater’s The Renaissance and Doyle’s “The Sign of Four,” Wilde’s De Profundis and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Murdered Cousin.”

Course	LIT 2152 Francophone African Literature
Professor	Emmanuel Dongala
CRN	95088
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 302
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

Even though African literature from francophone Africa is not yet a century old, it has already produced many important and enduring works. In this course, we will read and discuss some of the books that are now considered classics of that literature. The course will be given in English and the books will be read in translation. However, those who want to take it as part of the French program will read the texts in the original French and will have special tutoring. The primary aim of this course is to help students read closely some of the classics of African Francophone literature within their historical, social and political contexts.

Course	LIT 2155 African American Autobiographical Narrative
Professor	Mathew Johnson
CRN	95056
Schedule	Wed Fr 9:00 -10:20 am OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

The goal of this course is to gain an understanding of the autobiography as not only the core medium of black American literature for its first two centuries, but also as a vehicle of both artistic and political power through the Civil Rights Movement and into the modern era. We will start with Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through the works of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. Using Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery as a bridge between the worlds of bondage and freedom, we will continue on through the Renaissance with Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea and into the big black autobiographies of the mid-century, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promise Land. From there, we will look at the autobiographical narrative’s continuation into the Black Power era with Assata Shakur’s Assata. Finally, we’ll conclude with the contemporary memoir, as exemplified by John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers.

Course	LIT 2160 Powers of Horror: Sublimity, Exoticism, and Monstrosity
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	95164
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 303
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

The genre of horror, often called “the gothic,” encompasses texts as wide-ranging as the eighteenth-century horror novel The Castle of Otranto and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This seminar will examine how horror both forms and deforms the modern western subject by focusing on the gothic genre as a response to such historical developments as the slave trade, the rise of the bourgeoisie, imperialism, and the Cold War. We will examine such figures as the oriental tyrant, the corrupt priest, the savage, the vampire, the monster, and the madman—in order to ascertain why such figures emerge at the precise moments when western culture seems so confidently to assert its orderliness, rationality, and humanitarianism. Readings will include Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, Hogg’s Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Peacock’s Nightmare Alley, Stoker’s Dracula, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, as well as critical works by Marx, Freud, Foucault, Huyssen, and Jameson. Screenings will include Murnau’s Nosferatu, Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, Fuller’s Shock Corridor, and episodes from Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Course	LIT 2161 Postcolonial African Fiction: Political and Spiritual Centers
Professor	Helon Habila
CRN	95820
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 – 2:20 pm OLINLC 120
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Intensifying from the early 20th century, Africa experienced alienation and an alien presence as a consequence of European colonialism. We will study selected works of fiction to examine ways in which modern African literature identifies and responds to this alienation. The course takes a historical and biographical approach to show the differing emphases and themes in African literature during this time. We will ask: Was there a political, social, and spiritual center to Africa before the coming of Europeans and if so, can this center be identified, retrieved, or created anew? Are African writers translating their personal experiences of alienation and disorientation into their work? How does literature present social, political, and spiritual problems in terms of language, character, metaphor, and structure? How do the texts expand the consciousness of readers who may not be African? Authors and texts will include: Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe) House of Hunger, Bessie Head (South Africa/Botswana) Maru, M G Vassanji, (Kenya/ Canada) The In-between World of Vikram Lal, Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria) Soza Boy, Helon Habila (Nigeria) Waiting for an Angel, Moses Isegawa (Uganda) Abyssynian Chronicles.

Course	LIT 2404 Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	95822
Schedule	Th 7:00 – 9:20 pm OLIN 203
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The modern world has been characterized in many ways, as a time of unimaginable freedom, as well as existential angst, exile, loss of the idea of home, loss of the idea of positive heroes; a triumphant embracing of the “new” and the future, as well as the troubling encounter with machines and the menace of totalitarianism. It was a time when barriers of all sorts began to crumble—barriers between past and present, foreground and background, high and low culture, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Artists and writers responded in many different ways across the world. The writers we will read in this class represent the fulcrum of creativity in America, Central or Eastern Europe and Russia. Each lived at a different axis of modernity—where East met West, where the Russian Revolution provided a vibrant but terrifying image of liberation, where modern technological innovation produced endless possibilities of satirization of both the old world and the new, where ethnic and genocidal violence was developing under the surface of this innovation into the foreseeable European Holocaust. These writers have something powerful and unique to say about the advent of the modern period in the fantastic parallel worlds they created where machines take on lives of their own, grotesque transformations violate the laws of science, and inversions of normality become the norm. Through their fantastic conceptions a vision of modernity emerges which questions the most basic presumptions of western civilization—in art, morality, politics, the psyche and social life—a vision for which the West still has no satisfying response. All readings are in English. We will read The Marvelous Land of Oz (L. Frank Baum), The Metamorphosis (Kafka), RUR (Capek), War with the Newts (Capek), Street of Crocodiles (Schulz), Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass (Schulz), Envy (Olesha) The Bedbug (Mayakovsky).

There will be 4 short papers for the course & one final paper.

Course	LIT 2502 Shakespearean Tragedy
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	95011
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Theater

An intensive exploration of all of Shakespeare’s important tragedies, together with some reading from theatrical history and criticism. We will sometimes watch a Shakespeare film or work with a play as performers, but primarily this is a literature course for first- and second-year students. Topics will include contemporary issues like race and ethnicity, gender, the body, and political ethics, but historical awareness will also be important. Plays to be read include Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

Course	LIT 264 The Nineteenth-Century Continental Novel
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	95439
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 – 4:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: French, German and Russian Studies

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with representative examples of novels by distinguished French, Russian, German and Central European authors. Their works are analyzed for style, themes, ideological commitment, and social and political setting. Taken together they should provide an accurate account of the major artistic, philosophical and intellectual trends and developments on the Continent during the 19^th century. Readings include Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Balzac’s Cousine Bette, Hamsun’s Hunger, T. Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

Course	LIT 276B Chosen Voices: Jewish Authors
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
CRN	95051
Schedule	Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm PRE 101 Th 1:00 -2:20 pm PRE 101
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

Related Interest: SRE

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. Authors include Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley.

Course	LIT 280 The Heroic Age
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	95388
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 303
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

This course focuses on the early vernacular literature of northern and western Europe: epic, saga, elegy. Particular attention is paid to the relation between Christian teachings and tribal memories among the Celts and Teutons, and to changing perceptions of individual identity. Background readings in history and anthropology, and study of representative English, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Spanish, and Scandinavian works.

Course	LIT 290 History of the English Language
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	95389
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

An introduction both to the facts about the evolution of our common language during the last thousand years or so and to the ways in which linguistic changes can be discovered, described, explained, assessed, and grouped.