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
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.