Course |
LIT 204B Comparative Literature II: Baroque, Enlightment, and the Age of Sensibility |
|
Professor |
Joseph Luzzi |
|
CRN |
90217 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th
1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 304 |
|
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, Austen, Rousseau, and Goethe, as well as their recent critics
Adorno, Culler, Eagleton, Habermas, and Said.
Course |
LIT 204C Comparative Literature III |
|
Professor |
Cole Heinowitz |
|
CRN |
90173 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 2:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 309 |
|
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 |
Mark Lambert |
|
CRN |
90170 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 305 |
|
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 |
Nancy Leonard |
|
CRN |
90411 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 310 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: Theology
With the death of Shakespeare's Queen Elizabeth in
l603, the Elizabethan synthesis keeping religious and political conflict at bay
in England seemed to disintegrate. The
conflicts between courtiers and Puritan "Roundheads" were experienced
in literature before they broke out in open war. Some poets hid out in the
country, while others took to the pulpit or crown as sources of support
--institutions by no means stable. The
English fought bitterly a civil war which abolished the monarchy--only to
restore it at last as a symbolic function with real power located in
Parliament. Great writers like John
Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, George Herbert, Aphra Behn and John
Milton--with all the Renaissance behind his blind eyes--responded to their
historic moment with imaginative power and strength. Milton's Satan struggling against God in Paradise Lost became
the crucial figure of the age. The course will read a range of poetry and drama
of the period, and study the rise of the novel through Daniel Defoe’s Moll
Flanders and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, as it pursues the course of England's
literature through the early years of the eighteenth century.
Course |
LIT 252 English Literature III |
|
Professor |
Terence Dewsnap |
|
CRN |
90888 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:30
- 11:50 am OLIN 306 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW:
Literature in English
|
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
English
Literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Blake and Shelley’s
poetry and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
to modernist writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Some
attention to contemporary and to colonial and postcolonial writers in English.
Course |
LIT 257 Literature of the U.S. I |
|
Professor |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
|
CRN |
90169 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:30
- 11:50 am OLIN 204 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/C |
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies
What’s American about early American literature?
What makes it something other than the writing of European emigrés inhabiting a
strip of the western Atlantic coastline? The answer of many literary historians
has been that this writing only begins to become American in the at-first
intermittent and tentative act of turning away from a European homeland. We
cannot read a body of texts securely defined as “early American literature,” in
other words; we can only look for the stirrings of an apparently American
literariness within a set of texts. In this course, we will study the works of English-speaking
western Atlantic writers with a special emphasis on those moments when the
texts turn away from a European provenance and toward something barely
nameable: a mind seemingly without place, a place seemingly without mind. We
will study early Native American and African-American literature as an integral
part of this process of origination, and we will ultimately examine the
persistence of these uncanny American beginnings in “classic” American
literature. Readings will include the autobiographies, poems, and sermons of
Puritan New England, the travel literature of the South, the personal
narratives of African-Americans and Native Americans, and the novels of Charles
Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper.
Course |
LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III |
|
Professor |
Elizabeth Frank |
|
CRN |
90178 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Th 10:30 - 11:50 am ASP 302 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/C |
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed:
American Studies
In this course we will track the development of
American literature between 1865 and 1930 by exploring the often overlapping
movements of realism, naturalism and modernism, out of which major authors and
major works emerged after the Civil War and up to the eve of the Great
Depression. Authors include Twain, James, Ulysses S. Grant, Dreiser, Cather,
Stein, Anderson, James Weldon Johnson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken,
Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Stevens.
registration.