Course	LIT 3022 Promiscuity, Fidelty and Love: In Search of Don Juan
Professor	Mark Danner
CRN	95390
Schedule	Tu 9:30 -11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

What could be more "natural" than love? We have all lived it, chased its pleasures, been driven by its mandates, suffered from its pain. In this course we will trace the literary construction of love and fidelity and the elaborations of betrayal. Reading will include Tirso de Molina, Moliere, Casanova, Mozart/daPonte, Choderlos de Laclos, Byron, Shaw and Millhauser.

Course	LIT 3032 Empire, Sexuality and the Making of Romantic Travel
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	95052
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

This class begins in 1768, the year that Captain Cook set sail for Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, and returned to Britain with specimens, charts, and journals that put these parts of the world on European maps for the first time. We end in the year 1833, the year Britain moved to ban colonial slavery. Between these two dates, a major conceptual shift occurred in the way Britons looked at themselves and the world. The relationship between exploration and literature cannot be addressed outside the context of cultural imperialism. Explorers often traveled to spread British dominion over new lands. But what many writers learned from these explorations led them to question the morality of colonialism. In this class, we will study the paradoxical fact that literary writers saw through the eyes of explorers who worked in the service of empire, yet often used what they saw to question the material and ideological processes of imperialism. In the process, they pioneered new forms of literature which placed the British self in uncomfortable dialogue with the subjects of empire. We will study this phenomenon in the context of popular non-imperial travel writing of the day, such as the radical poet Helen Maria Williams’s eye-witness account of the French Revolution, and in the context of literary voyages, such as Lord Byron’s Don Juan and Wordsworth’s Prelude. We will then be in a position to question the complex relationship between the traditions of literary travel, political journalism, and imperial exploration during the era that saw the rise of Britain as the world’s preeminent imperial power. In addition to the texts already cited, readings will include Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and Robert Southey’s Curse of Kehama. Enrollment is limited to students with upper college standing unless authorized by instructor.

Course	LIT 3114 William Blake & His World
Professor	Joel Kovel
CRN	95014
Schedule	Wed 9:30 -11:50 am OLIN 308
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the most remarkable artists in the Western tradition. Exquisite lyricist, composer of fantastically difficult philosophical poems, recoverer of the tradition of illuminated manuscript, superb engraver, visionary painter, technical innovator, political radical, subject of hallucinatory-mystical experiences, and utter commercial failure, Blake continues to astound. In this course, we will consider the life and work as a whole, as they were played out in relation to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism. Blake will be regarded as progenitor of a coherent and transformative world-view whose implications remain as fresh as they were two centuries ago.

Prerequisite: At least one upper college literature course, or consultation with the professor.

Course	LIT 3207 Responsibility and Cultural Memory
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	95012
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: A/B	NEW: HUM

Cross listed: Human Rights and Integrated Arts

A seminar that explores how personal narrative, monuments and memorials, and photography document and produce the memory of trauma, at once vividly present and inevitably dependent on our ethical response for its very existence. War, torture, suffering, violence: the memory of trauma is cultural memory, so that struggles over testimony, memorials and sites of suffering articulate the haunting of the present by what is not visible, not yet expressed about the past. We will talk through some issues of human rights, drawing on the discourses of politics, the media, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. We will read theoretical texts by Benjamin, Agamben, Blanchot, Caruth, Felman, Alcava, Baer, and LaCapra. Case studies will include narratives by Holocaust survivors such as Szpilman (author of the novel on which The Pianist was based) and Levi; and from survivors of the “desaparecidos” of Latin America. We will explore the complexities of response and representation to a variety of visually powerful material, from photographs of Civil War battlegrounds and Holocaust sites, to public monuments and films. Upper College standing is assumed. Interested students should email Professor Leonard before registration.

Course	LIT 3211 Modern French Plays: The Theatre of Contestation
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	95440
Schedule	Mon Wed 4:30 – 5:50 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: French Studies

Related interest: Theater

A study of plays, “revolutionary” in their own right, misleadingly referred to as The Theater of the Absurd or of Cruelty. Their authors bring to the stage, in unusual forms, images and symbols, works that are simultaneously realistic in their depiction of human motives and values, expressionistic or surrealistic in their episodic structure, explicit of implicit in their ideology. No projecting back at its spectators a comforting image of a social milieu with which they are familiar; no articulation of sentiments and beliefs to which they can all subscribe; no systematic simplification of every issue to give them the satisfying impression of having understood the point or message of the play. What they offer is more challenging, appeals as much, if not more, to our mind as to our emotions and aesthetic sensibilities. Aware of this we read, discuss, write and time permitting, conduct a workshop, on: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame; Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and The Bald Soprano; Genet’s The Maids; Sartre’s The Devil and the God Almighty; Adamov’s Professor Taranne; Arrabla’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. Students with an adequate command of French are encouraged to read in the original text and discuss it in French during a weekly tutorial for two extra credits.

Course	LIT 333 New Directions-Contemporary Fiction
Professor	Bradford Morrow
CRN	95404
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: A/B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed by innovative contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. In this course we will closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last quarter century in order to begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of work by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and others. One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

Course	LIT 3352 Poetics of Modernity Part II; Art & Politics 1945-75
Professor	Ann Lauterbach
CRN	95060
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Integrated Arts

It could be argued that World War II set in play the demise of certain aspects of modernism, while simultaneously preparing the ground for post-modernity, and that the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s instantiated this historical motion. In this course we will explore the ways in which a utopian desire to accommodate the present and invent the future by finding new aesthetic forms began to fray, as writers and artists responded to challenges brought on by post-war politics and the new media age. Such instrumental dyads as private/public, authority/identity, high/low, elite/experimental, theory/practice lead to imperatives, ruptures, and initiatives that interrogate the possibilities for art in a turbulent time. Readings from a variety of sources in poetry and poetics; cultural, literary and art criticsm; prose fiction and narrative. (Celan, Jabès, Auden, Oppen, Hughes, Ginsberg, Riding, Rich; Burroughs, Mailer, Baldwin, Beckett, Bowles, Nabokov, Borges; Adorno, Arendt, Debord, Barthes, Deleuze, Trilling, Greenberg, Sontag.) Weekly response papers. One term project. Active class discussion. You do not need to have taken Part One to sign up for this class. Students knowledgeable in concurrent music, film, social science, are encouraged to attend.

Course	LIT 3354 Faulkner and Morrison
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	95064
Schedule	Wed Fr 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 304
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Related interest: Africana Studies

An intensive study of two of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century. In the first half of the course, we will read four Faulkner novels—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!—together with some of his short fiction and a wide range of essays, interviews and critical studies. In the second half of the course, we will do the same thing with Morrison: the novels will be The Bluest Eye, Sula, The Song of Solomon, and Beloved, and the secondary materials will include Playing in the Dark, her influential monograph on American literature. Topics will include race, violence, prophecy, motherhood, ancestry, ecstasy, privacy, the effort to speak the unspeakable, and the gorgeous pleasures of words. Requirements include two ten-page papers. Preference to moderated literature majors.

Course	LIT 382 Joyce and Beckett
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	95047
Schedule	Th 9:30 -11:50 am OLIN 309
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Irish Studies

This is a seminar on the art and ideas of two of the twentieth century’s significant experimenters. We will be using biographical materials to illuminate the association, and sometimes collaboration, of Joyce and Beckett. Readings include Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses. Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, Watt; also several of his plays including Waiting for Godot, All That Fall, and Cascando.

Course	LIT 3902 The Mask & its Metaphors
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	95142
Schedule	Tu 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 306
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

The push in America to “make it new” meant a break with the past, with convention.  For many writers, this break was facilitated by the use of an “Other.”  For instance, critic Michael North argues that in the work of Gertrude Stein and Picassso “the step away from conventional verisimilitude into abstraction is accomplished by a figurative change of race.”  With Stein this meant the use of the African-American voice and with Picasso his African masks.  The mask as both a literal and figurative device runs through modern literary works.  In this course we will examine how this looking at oneself through a mask impacts modernist narratives and how the mask subverts conventional definitions of race and gender.  We will read Stein’s Three Lives, Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal, Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday,  Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Freud’s Totem and Taboo among others and some literary theory and criticism.