Course

LIT 2006   “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”: Imagining the Environment in English Literature and Culture

Professor

Deirdre d’Albertis

CRN

97482

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       10:30 -11:50 am  OLIN 301

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: Environmental Studies; STS

In his 1884 lecture, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” social critic and art historian John Ruskin sounds an apocalyptic note of warning when he describes the drastic meteorological changes he has discerned over a lifetime of observing nature.  He remarks upon the deadly “plague-wind” that hangs over Britain: “it looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke . . .but mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls. . .”  In this course we will consider how ideas of the environment were contested and consolidated in the nineteenth-century literary imagination: what would romantic poetry be without the Lake District or the close observation of its natural features by Dorothy and William Wordsworth?  Beginning with the romantics, we will investigate the impact of industrialization on the English countryside.  How was a threatened loss of an imagined integrity necessary to the project of this poetry? How does literature draw upon natural history to represent landscape at this time?  With the advent of Victorianism, representations of the natural environment became even more laden with political and ethical values.  Our readings in Dickens and Hardy will enable us to explore nineteenth-century notions of ecology and the rise of a “fossil fuel imaginary.”  How did Victorians understand the nation to be torn between identification with the country as opposed to the city?  In the context of new concerns for public health, sanitation, and population growth, how did literary culture both elaborate and interrogate patterns of consumption and waste particular to industrialization and modernism? What alternative ethos could be imagined in this period?  We will conclude with early twentieth-century texts by Forster, Lawrence and Ballard dramatizing the “end of nature” in a series of different registers.  Under consideration will be works by:  Thomas Malthus, Gilbert White, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and J.G. Ballard.  

 

Course

LIT 2015   American Indian Fictions

Professor

Geoffrey Sanborn

CRN

97064

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       1:30 -2:50 pm      OLIN 203

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights, SRE

By the time that D'Arcy McNickle, the first major American Indian novelist, began publishing his work, Indians--the currently preferred self-description of the people sometimes referred to as "Native Americans"—had been stock literary figures for over three hundred years.  In works ranging from Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper and the southwestern novels of Willa Cather, white American writers had collectively generated a simultaneously fixed and ungrounded notion of "Indianness."  On the one hand, Indians could not belong to the nation because they existed outside of time, beyond change.  On the other hand, their Indianness, the imaginary essence of what they were, could be repeatedly sought out, appropriated, and refigured by white people in need of a respite from modernity.  As the critic Philip J. Deloria has written, the figure of the Indian in white American culture "gave the nation a bedrock, for it fully engaged the contradiction most central to a range of American identities--that between an unchanging, essential Americanness and the equally American liberty to make oneself into something new." In this course, we will read the tradition of fiction–about-Indians and Indianness in relation to the tradition of fiction–by-Indians that has sprung up in its wake.  Authors include Rowlandson, Brown, Cooper,  Melville, Helen Hunt Jackson, Cather, Black Elk, McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie. 

 

Course

LIT 202   Metrical Verse

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

CRN

97050

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm      OLIN 309

Distribution

Practicing Arts

Students will learn how to read and write metrical verse by writing exercises in the principal meters (Accentual/Syllabic, Accentual, Syllabic, Anglo-Saxon Alliterative, Haiku, etc.) and the principal forms (the ballad, the sonnet, blank verse, nonsense verse, the ode, the song, the dramatic monologue, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum) that make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world. They will also be required to memorize and recite four poems. A particular concern will be the relation between meter and the speaking voice; an additional concern will be the kinds of trope that distinguish classical (figurative) from modernist (elliptical) poetry. 

 

Course

LIT 2020   Literature, Language & Lies

Professor

Francine Prose

CRN

97059

 

Schedule

Fr                2:00 -4:20 pm      OLIN 201

Distribution

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 2060   Modern Arabic Literature

Professor

Youssef Yacoubi

CRN

97072

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 107

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: Middle Eastern Studies

This course will survey the history and texts of diverse and polycentric literary and artistic traditions of the Middle East and North Africa during the last two centuries. Our exploration will include works of fiction, poetry, visual art, autobiography, memoir, film and historiography. It will review some of the major literary, cultural and at times philosophical currents that shaped the Modern Arab world. Our analysis and reading will be informed by the recent developments in cultural and critical theory. Major authors will include Naguib Mahfouz, Idris Yusuf, Mahmoud Darwish, Hanan Al-shaykh and Hoda Barakat. The aim of the course is twofold: to introduce students to the diversity of aesthetic responses in Arab literary and cultural practice, and to examine questions of nation and identity formation, religion, tradition, colonial, postcolonial history, and diaspora. The course is usually organized around four themes/ topics: historical and social background to Modern Arabic Literature; the interface between tradition and modernity; representation of women and gender; the re-writing of political repressions.

 

Course

LIT 209 / GER 309   Goethe's Faust

Professor

Franz Kempf

CRN

97043

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm      OLINLC 120

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

Cross-listed: German Studies

An intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of this striving provides the basis for our analysis of the play's central themes, individuality, knowledge and transcendence, in regard to their meaning in Goethe's time and their relevance for our time. To gain a fuller appreciation of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, we will also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (e.g. Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele, Friedrich W. Murnau's film Faust).  Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German who want to read  (some of) the texts in the original can sign up for a 2 or 4 credit tutorial in German. Please see instructor for details.

 

Course

LIT 2139  African American Traditions I

Professor

Charles Walls

CRN

97546

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 305

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE

What special problems arise when the presentation of ourselves into literary culture contributes to or challenges an already diminished social presence and power?  In what ways would we want to create and imagine ourselves, remember our history, and construct our future? In this course, we will explore African-American literature from the Colonial era to the Harlem Renaissance and examine the various forms and voices that African-Americans have used to achieve literary and, consequently, social authority.  We will interrogate the degree to which this body of literature forms a coherent tradition and complicates notions of race, nation, gender, citizenship, and diaspora.  We will also consider its relationship to traditional literary modes like sentimentalism, realism, naturalism, and modernism.  Readings will include autobiography, essays, novels, poetry, and plays; writers will likely include Wheatly, Douglass, Jacobs, Chesnutt, Du Bois, Hopkins, Toomer,

Larsen, Hughes, McKay, and Hurston.

 

Course

LIT 215   Victorian Essays & Detectives

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

CRN

97036

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 307

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

Related interest:  STS

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

ITAL 215   Humanism, Hermeticism, Hieroglyphs, Heretics: Introduction to Italian Renaissance Literature and Thought

Professor

Nina Cannizzaro

CRN

97032

 

Schedule

Tu  Th  5:30 – 6:50 pm  OLIN 101

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

Cross-listed:  STS

Many of the most appealing concepts born of the Italian Renaissance—from the reappropriation of Latin and Greek learning to the belief in divine madness, occult influences, original knowledge (prisca theologia / pious philosophy), or the essential cosmic harmony underlying any literary and figurative expression, as well as architecture and even mathematical formulas—were considered increasingly heretical after the office of the Inquisition was created in 1542. They were nevertheless avidly explored in acceptable venues and built the foundation of  European-wide intellectual exchange.  This course will introduce students to the repertoire of basic cultural referents with which the early-modern individual viewed knowledge, and perceived history as well as the present. Among the authors we will explore are Dante, Petrarch, Alberti, Ficino (his interpretations and commentaries of the Picatrix and Pimander of the Hermetic corpus in addition to own writings on love and magic), Pico della Mirandola, Landino, Machiavelli, Ortensio Lando, A. Doni, P. Manuzio, F. Sansovino, Tasso, and Garzoni. No prior knowledge of period assumed, but welcomed. Conducted in English. 

 

Course

LIT 2152   Classics of Francophone African Literature

Professor

Emmanuel Dongala

CRN

97525

 

Schedule

Wed  1:30 – 3:50 pm  HEG 201

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies, French 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 Department will read the texts in the original French and will have special tutoring.

 

Course

LIT 2167   Poetries of Philosophy from Dada to the Present

Professor

Paul Stephens

CRN

97066

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm      OLIN 308

Distribution

Literature in English

Although this course takes off where “Philosophies of Poetry from Plato to Dada” left off, no prerequisite knowledge of poetry or philosophy is assumed, and this course is open to students of all levels and backgrounds. We will investigate how, subsequent to the rise of the historical avant-garde in the twentieth century, a truce may have been called in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Our primary readings will be (broadly speaking) poems with philosophical content, but we will also read selected manifestoes and short philosophical texts, as well as “anti-philosophical” polemics. Readings to include selections from Wittgenstein, Rilke, Tzara, Eliot, Stein, Riding, Heidegger, Williams, Stevens, Tolson, Zukofsky, Ashbery, Bernstein, Mackey, Hejinian. 

 

Course

LIT 2168   The European Novel 1700-1800

Professor

Robert Weston

CRN

97071

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   3:00 -4:20 pm      OLIN 202

Distribution

Literature in English

Exploring the rise of the novel in England, France and Germany, this course will provide students with a forum for rigorous critical engagement with major novels of the Enlightenment period. The novel emerges in conjunction with enormous social change and the genre proved especially suited to critical reflection on social relations. Through close readings of representative novels from the period, we will explore the role of the genre in the emergence of a distinctly bourgeois culture, in the formation of female identity, and in the shaping of social mores. Since the course will be comparative in design, special emphasis will be placed on the way novels have figured in the shaping of national identities. With an attention to important sub-genres of the novel, such as the sentimentalist novel, the anti-novel, the psychological novel, the philosophical novel, and the Bildungsroman, our readings will be informed by eighteenth-century theories of the emergent genre as well as more contemporary literary theory. We will read works by Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, Rousseau, Sade, and Diderot, Goethe, Moritz, and Hölderlin, as well as short theoretical texts ranging from Blanckenburg to Watt, McKeon and Moretti.

 

Course

LIT / FREN 217  Marcel  Proust: In Search of Lost Time

Professor

Eric Trudel

CRN

97070

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 205

Distribution

Literature in English

See French section for description.  

 

Course

LIT 223   Cultural Reportage

Professor

Peter Sourian

CRN

97002

 

Schedule

Tu               4:00 -6:20 pm      PRE 101

Distribution

Practicing Arts

For the self motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. The course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, but not restricted to majors. 

 

Course

CLAS / LIT  225   The Odyssey of Homer: An Intensive Reading

Professor

Daniel Mendelsohn

CRN

97057

 

Schedule

Mon Wed  12:00 – 1:20  OLIN 204

Distribution

Literature in English

See Classics section for description. 

 

Course

JAPN / LIT  225   Modern Japanese Literature in Translation

Professor

Hoyt Long

CRN

97537

 

Schedule

Mon Wed  12:00 – 1:20  OLIN 307

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

See Japanese section for description.

 

Course

LIT 2270   Political Theologies

Professor

Nancy Leonard

CRN

97052

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 310

Distribution

Humanities

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Theology

Who is my neighbor? What is my responsibility towards him?  How do I understand my action if I want to go beyond the conception of meaningful action as assertion of will, as power—a conception, Rowan Williams reminds us, in common between the blithe assumptions of liberalism and the extreme of fascism?  These questions restore the relevance of prior ideas about being, or ontology, to the political - even the theological—without, of course, presuming the requirement of belief.  This course will take up many issues: the identity of the other, the ethics of our engagement with that other, and the lacks addressed by both revolution and revelation. All seek in some way a language which represents law, community, and event in more meaningful kinds of human action. Debates will be drawn from a variety of thinkers from Paul, Augustine, and the Hebrew Bible to contemporary works of ethical and political philosophy by Slavoj Zizek, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, John Milbank, Antonio Negri, Regina Schwartz, and others.        

 

Course

LIT 2331   Classic American Gothic

Professor

Donna Grover

CRN

97038

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 205

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The gothic novel is considered to be the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses and heroines in distress.  Its use of melodrama and the macabre often disguise the psychological, sexual, and emotional issues that are in fact more horrifying than the contents of a haunted house.  The gothic novel in America has often confronted topics pertinent to American identity and history.  In this course we will examine how many American authors used the gothic genre to actually engage with social, political and cultural concerns.   We will read novels and short stories that span the 19th and 20th century by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,  Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,  Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson and James Baldwin. 

 

Course

LIT / SPAN 240   Testimonies of Latin America: Perspectives from the Margins

Professor

Nicole Caso

CRN

97034

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm      OLIN 203

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture /Rethinking Difference

See Spanish section for description.  

 

Course

LIT 2404   Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World

Professor

Jonathan Brent

CRN

97029

 

Schedule

Tu               7:00 -9:20 pm      OLIN 202

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed:  Russian & Eurasian Studies

Related interest:  STS

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

CLAS / LIT 242A   Classical Mythology

Professor

William Mullen

CRN

97003

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      RKC 200

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

This course will introduce students to selected myths of ancient Greece and Rome, through texts in a variety of genres—epic, lyric, dramatic, ancient prose summaries.  Selections will be made along the lines of a few of the principal activities in which gods, heroes and mortals all engage and can thus be compared, e.g. war (in the sky and on the earth); speech (the way gods are shown addressing mortals and the actual hymns and prayers in which the ancients addressed their gods); love (everything from lust and rape to affection and amorousness, between gods and humans as well as within each group). Readings (all in English translation) are largely of primary texts from Greek and Roman literature, with occasional texts for comparison from two other sets of cultures: first, the Indo-European cousins of the Greeks and Romans, e.g. Sanskrit, Norse and Irish texts; second, the complex Near Eastern civilizations with whom they interacted, primarily Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts.  Along the way, we shall examine and practice deploying various theoretical approaches to myth: psychological, ritual, structuralist, ideological, catastrophist, environmentalist.  No previous background is required.

 

Course

CLAS / LIT 242 B   Classical Mythology

Professor

William Mullen

CRN

97699

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:00 - 5:20 pm     OLIN 204

Distribution

Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

See description above.

 

Course

LIT 2501   Shakespeare

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

CRN

97048

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 309

Distribution

Literature in English

A careful reading of nine masterpieces by the greatest writer of the English language. The plays, representing the full range of his genius in comedy, tragedy, and romance, will be chosen from among the following: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest.

 

Course

LIT 2650   Irish Fiction

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

CRN

97049

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 309

Distribution

Literature in English

Cross-listed:  Irish & Celtic Studies

Irish fiction of the modern period--the stories, novels, and plays of the past 300 years--has been divided between two traditions: the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers who were English by descent but deeply identified with Ireland; and the Catholic tradition of modern Ireland. From the first, we will read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, together with plays by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, plus additional fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, et al. From the second, we will read Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, and additional fiction by Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty and many others. As background we will also read a brief history of Ireland during this period.

 

Course

LIT 280   The Heroic Age

Professor

Mark Lambert

CRN

97047

 

Schedule

Tu Th          9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 201

Distribution

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 2882   Different Voices, Different Views: Contemporary Novellas and Short Stories from the Non-Western World

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

CRN

97061

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 107

Distribution

Literature in English

A close reading of selected plays, poems, and short stories by contemporary authors from North, West and South Africa, Egypt, India and China.  These works are analyzed for their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray the social conditions and political problems in the respective countries.  We examine the extent to which their writers have been drawing on native traditions or been affected by extraneous artistic trends, or belief systems such as Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Democratic Socialism. Authors include: Assia Djebar, Sembéne Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nawal Saadawi, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, R.K. Narayan, Mahasveta Devi, and Salman Rushdie.

 

Course

LIT 287 / GER 387 Richard Wagner:

The Ring of the Nibelung

Professor

Franz Kempf

CRN

97044

 

Schedule

Tu          10:30 - 11:50 am       OLINLC  120

Fr           10:00 – 11:20 am      OLINLC  120

Fr                12:15 -6:15 pm     CAMPUS WEIS

Distribution

Literature in English

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 who want to read  (some of) the texts in the original can sign up for a 2 or 4 credit tutorial in German. Please see instructor for details.