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

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

Course	LIT 204A Comparative Literature I - The Middle Ages to the Renaissance: The Birth of the Author
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	97508
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 – 5:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? While these questions continue to divide literary critics today, with some emphasizing the social origins and others the individual origins of such works, these issues are of particular interest to readers of medieval and Renaissance literature, as it was during this time period that the notion of the author, as we conceive of it today, first developed. In this course, we will be considering the shift from saga and epic to lyric and romance; from orally based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Dante Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the writings of the poet-thief Villon, and the renegade monk Rabelais.

Course	LIT 204C Comparative Literature III
Professor	Thomas Keenan
CRN	97042
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00 -1:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	Literature in English

This course examines the peculiar and perplexing Euro-American literary transformation that stretches from what is loosely named Romanticism to the edge of 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, Kleist, Goethe, Hoffman, Balzac, Flaubert, James, Baudelaire, Rilke, and others.

Course	LIT 250 English Literature I
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	97051
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	Literature in English

An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance literature in England, which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of critical vocabulary and imagination, and 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	Mark Lambert
CRN	97046
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 - 10:20 am OLIN 201
Distribution	Literature in English

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost. but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values. After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers.

Course	LIT 252 English Literature III
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	97035
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 304
Distribution	Literature in English

English Literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Blake and Shelley's poetry to modernist writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Course	LIT 257 Literature of the U.S. I
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	97063
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 203
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

What’s American about early American literature? What makes it something other than the writing of European émigrés 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 read for the stirrings of identifiably American literariness within a set of texts. In this course, we will study some of the greatest 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 eighteenth-century 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 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	Charles Walls
CRN	97040
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 203
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

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