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

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

Course	LIT 204B Comp Lit II: Baroque, Enlightment, and the Age of Sensibility
Professor	Joseph Luzzi
CRN	95444
Schedule	Tu Th 4:30 – 5:50 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

We will study the major theoretical and practical literary issues in the period 1600 to 1800. Our discussions will begin by examining the dialogue between poetry and the other arts of the Baroque, especially the music of Bach and the sculpture of Bernini. Then our focus will be on how principal literary debates (e.g., the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, the aesthetic attitudes of the New Science, the Encyclopedia project, and the emergence of modern feminism) shaped some of the profound historical and cultural changes of the age. As part of our sustained reflection on the role and reach and poetry, we will also examine the critique of Enlightenment rationality and rhetoric in the Age of Sensibility and Storm and Stress movements. A final goal will be to consider how the idea of "literature" itself underwent changes in the 17th and 18th centuries that reflected the complex attitudes toward modernity in this period of scientific, cultural, and political revolution. Authors will include Descartes, Vico, Voltaire, Mme de Graffigny, Rousseau, Goethe, and Wollstonecraft; as well as their recent critics Adorno, Culler, Eagleton, Habermas, and Said.

Course	LIT 204C Comp Lit III: Romanticism to Modernity
Professor	Marina van Zuylen
CRN	95065
Schedule	Wed Fr 12:00 -1:20 pm OLINLC 210
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

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.

Course	LIT 250 English Literature I
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	95010
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies, Theology

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.

Course	LIT 251 English Literature II
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	95048
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, including metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and others, Milton's Paradise Lost, and genre poetry; drama (revenge plays, Restoration, and later, comedies); also the beginnings of the novel.

Course	LIT 252 English Literature III
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	95053
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 201
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the present day—a period marked by the effects of the French and American Revolutions, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, two world wars, the development of regional identities within Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of “Britishness” in a global context. Beginning with the Romantics and ending with contemporary English poetry, we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of Britain, conservatism versus radicalism, the empire, and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. The centerpiece of the course is close reading—of poetry, prose, essays, and plays. 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 shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether British literature represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the historical developments during the last two and a half centuries will be a continuous focus.

Course	LIT 257 Literature of the U.S. I: Cross-Referencing the Puritans
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
CRN	95050
Schedule	Wed Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 304
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

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.

Course	LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III
Professor	Karin Roffman
CRN	95063
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

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 unfoldings of each writer’s art. Authors include Twain, James, Crane, Chesnutt, Chopin, Wharton, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Larsen, Cather, Hughes, Stevens, and Faulkner.