98209

LIT 2007 Imagining Environment in East Asia

Hoyt Long

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 308

FLLC

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, STS; related interest: Human Rights We live in an age when it is difficult to imagine a national politics, or even a personal ethics, that is absent any form of environmental concern. Rampant urbanization, global warming, and rapid declines in bio-diversity, among other things, have all contributed to a growing sense of global environmental crisis. Taking this crisis as its starting point, this course begins with the very basic question of what it is to imagine environment and one’s relation to it. What gets included in the concept of “environment” and what gets left out? How has the concept been imagined historically and across cultural divides? Can we learn something valuable about our own perceptions of environment by studying those of other times and places? To get at such questions, this course introduces students to the environmental writing and thought of East Asia, with a specific focus on Japan. Interpreting “environment” broadly as any unique configuration of the human and non-human worlds, the course takes up a diverse array of topics: moral and religious attitudes toward nature (as found in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto), literary responses to the natural and urban environment (e.g., Matsuo Basho, Miyazawa Kenji, Miyazaki Hayao), the formation of a modern environmental ethics, the social impact of industrial pollution (Minamata Disease, Three Gorges Dam), the rise of overcrowded mega-cities, and the imagining of East Asia’s environmental future(s). Readings will be drawn from the fields of literature, science, sociology, urban studies, history, philosophy, and film. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.

98217

LIT 202 Metrical Verse

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

3:00 -4:20 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

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 dramatic monologue, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum) that make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world. 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.

98195

LIT 2020 Literature, Language & Lies

Francine Prose

M . . . .

9:30 - 11:50 am

ASP 302

ELIT

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.

98443

LIT 2060 Modern Arabic Literature: Changing Places in the Arab World

Elizabeth Holt

M . W . .

12:00-1:20 pm

RKC 102

ELIT

Cross-listed: Middle Eastern Studies In the 20^th and 21^st century Arab world, colonialism, war, the spread of capitalism, modernization projects, tourism, and population growth have radically shifted how people experience the places where they live. This course will survey major novels, short stories, poems and films that creatively engage the ever-changing cities, villages, farmland and deserts of Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. We will ask how representations of spaces and places intersect with ideas about class, gender and otherness. The course will also interrogate what it means to be reading these texts in translation.

98924

LIT 2063 America in the 1950s

Elizabeth Antrim

. T . Th .

9:00 – 10:20 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Popular representations of the 1950s portray the decade as an age of consensus and conformity, but the literature of the era tells a different story. In this course we will pursue a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and political issues of the 1950s, the while tracking the formal experimentations in which its authors were increasingly engaged.  Topics to be discussed include the constraints of suburban life, Cold War paranoia, counterculturalism, race, and gender.  Authors include J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Sloan Wilson, Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lorraine Hansberry, and Saul Bellow.  We will supplement our study of the literature with occasional film screenings, including All That Heaven Allows and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

98214

LIT 2101 Myth / Tale / Story

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

As the anthropologist Malinowski has written, myths are "a special class of stories, regarded as sacred...stories [that] live not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality." It is the purpose of this course to demonstrate how myths that once were sacred are secularized when recycled as literary art, and how many of the greatest stories written by modem masters--from Melville to Kafka--have tapped into the great myths of the past. But between those myths and the modem short story lies the vast, unchartered region of the tale--the oral tradition of story-telling. "The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales," wrote Walter Benjamin, who argued that "the fairy tale taught mankind...to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits." We will explore these mysterious waters by first reading The Metamorphoses of Ovid, followed by The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and classic fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm et aI., before tracing the residual presence of myth in the work of modem masters, both male and female. Some of the papers assigned will give students an opportunity to write their own tales if they wish.

98442

LIT 2102 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

Charles Walls

M. W . .

12:00 -1:20 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most recognized and dynamic periods in African-American literary history, but its actual historical, cultural, racial, and geographical contexts are less understood. This course will examine the Harlem Renaissance from a variety of perspectives that will interrogate and reveal the complexity of the period’s monolithic terms and contexts: Harlem, Black, and the1920s. Along this line of inquiry, we will consider, for example, how black writers of the interwar period connected with broader American modernist, nativist, and pluralist trends; how pragmatist and Marxist philosophies influenced a formidable reconsideration of political and aesthetic representation; how various musical forms, as well as European and African art forms, provided rich and varied cultural resources for emerging literary production. Other themes and questions will concern black internationalism, primitivism, ethnography, the New Negro, and Négritude. Writers will include Locke, William James, Dewey, Du Bois, van Vechten, Cunard, Maran, Senghor, Schuyler, Thurman, McKay, Padmore, Kandinsky, Larsen, Fauset, Toomer, Freud, Boas, Hurston, Spencer, Grimké, Brown, Cullen, and Hughes.

98447

LIT 2137 African-American Traditions I

Charles Walls

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE; related interest: Human Rights 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.

98154

LIT 2153 Myth and Variation in Russian Modernism

Jennifer Day

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLINLC 118

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian Studies From fin-de-siècle Decadence to “writing for the desk drawer” under Stalin, Russian literature and arts of the first decades of the twentieth century are marked by a preoccupation with the relationship between art and life. For Russian writers and artists of this period, looking to the future, to another reality, or to a higher state of being—often against the background of catastrophic sociohistorical contexts—implied a creative process that may be best characterized as mythology in the making. This course will trace the interrelationship between various Russian art forms of the Modernist period, including literature, theater and film, visual arts, and architecture, from the turn of the twentieth century to 1940. We will also treat the links between art, gender, and politics as pre-Revolutionary mythologies of “life into art” evolve into their post-Revolutionary versions. Students will read works by Sologub, Bely, Blok, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky, Zamiatin, Babel, Olesha, Platonov, and Bulgakov as well as Modernist group manifestos and recent critical analysis. Conducted in English.

98219

LIT 2156 Romantic Literature in English

Cole Heinowitz

M . W . .

3:00 -4:20 pm

RKC 200

ELIT

This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. The term traditionally used to categorize this literature, “romantic,” is interestingly problematic: throughout the course we will question the assumptions built into this term instead of assuming that we know what it means or taking for granted a series of supposed characteristics of “romantic” literature and art. We will also explore the extent to which key conflicts in British culture during the “romantic period,” including the founding of the United States, independence movements in the Americas, the development of free trade ideology, and the debates over slavery and colonialism, are still at issue today. The centerpiece of this course is the close reading of poetry. 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 at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether “romantic” writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include canonical and non-canonical authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.

98204

LIT 2163 Innuendo

Nancy Leonard

. .W. F

10:30 –11:50 am

OLIN 101

ELIT

Studies in the not quite said of fiction, poetry, drama and theory. Perspectives will be offered from linguistics, poetics, etiquette, theater history and critical theory which go some way to explain why we so often need not to articulate fully what most wants saying. We’ll learn to distinguish the contexts and purposes of different kinds of innuendo by the analysis of speech acts, poetic statements, philosophical claims and social prohibitions. Close reading and active discussion of literature will be at the center of the course. Readings will be drawn from Ferdinand de Sassure and other linguists, J. L Austin, Deborah Tannen, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Miss Manners, Proust, Chekhov, Wilde, Beckett, Agamben, Blanchot, and Derrida. Critical and creative writing assignments.

98150

LIT 2169 Richard Wright

Donna Grover

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 305

ELIT

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies In his book, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy urged readers to reexamine Richard Wright and his works within an international context.  In this year of the Richard Wright Centennial it is important to reassess Wright’s work and the influence he had upon others  in the mid 20th century.   This course places Wright on a world stage and examines his little known alliances and contributions to philosophy, psychology and world politics.  Some of the aspects of Wright’s life and literature we will study are his interest in and contributions to the psychology of deviance, his friendships with both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre as well as his involvement in the Pan-African movement.  We will read Black Boy and Native Son as well as his less known works such as his travelogue, Pagan Spain and a posthumously published novel, A Father’s Law.

98925

LIT 2173 The Twentieth Century American Short Story

Elizabeth Antrim

. T. Th .

4:00-5:20 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

In this course we will trace the development of twentieth-century American short story via rigorous close-readings of texts, while paying careful attention to literary, historical and market-based contexts.  We will begin by looking at formative Russian, French, and British influences on the short story, and then explore American modernist approaches to narration, the form’s association with national and personal identity, and the radical transformation of the
short story in the post-war period.  Authors include Chekhov, Gogol, Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, Mansfield, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Welty, Salinger, O'Connor, Malamud, Baldwin, Barth, Oates, Carver, Beattie, O'Brien, Moore, Diaz, and Lahiri.

98174

LIT 223 Cultural Reportage

Peter Sourian

. T . . .

4:00 -6:20 pm

PRE 101

PART

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.

98236

CLAS 226 Virgil, Augustine, Dante

Joseph Luzzi / Benjamin Stevens

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 202

HUM

See Classics section for description.

98215

LIT 2401 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Mark Lambert

M . W . .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies The unities and contrasts, pleasure, and meanings of this rich collection. Study of Chaucer's language and some background readings (e.g. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), but primarily an examination of a great poem. No previous knowledge of Middle English required.

98411

LIT 2431 From Gutenberg to Google: Literature, Media, Information Systems

Paul Stephens

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: STS This class surveys the influence of technology on the production and dissemination of literature. We will begin by studying the history of the printed book, and examine the influence of the press on the development of national literatures. From there we will move to a consideration of the book as an aesthetic object, and investigate how books as material objects shape notions of the literary. We will conclude by looking at the influence of electronic media on literary production. During the course of the semester, we will visit at least one rare book library in the New York area. Readings include Febvre and Martin, Chartier, Darnton, Dickinson, Benjamin, McLuhan, Queneau, Bernstein, Philips, Drucker, Hejinian, McGann, Lessig, Kittler, Haraway.

98904

LIT 249 Arthurian Romance

Mark Lambert

. T . Th .

2:30 – 3:50 pm

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies A study of the variety of concerns, meanings, and pleasures in medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights. Readings in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot, Beroul and Thomas's Romance of Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other works.

98203

LIT 2501 Shakespeare

Nancy Leonard

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 102

ELIT

An intensive exploration of a range of Shakespeare’s plays, which represent the human, continually surprise with every reading, and engage us seriously with the forms of experience Shakespeare did so much to shape: comedy, tragedy, and romance. This semester the plays will include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. We will sometimes watch a Shakespeare film or work with a play as performers, but primarily this is a literature course. Topics will include contemporary issues like race and ethnicity, gender, the body, and ethical conflicts between the excessively rigid and the all-too-relaxed. Plays will be often tied to their period and to new perceptions by scholars. Open to all.

98497

GER / LIT 258 The Beheaded Angel: Postwar German Literature in Translation

Peter Filkins

. T . Th.

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 308

FLLC

See German section for description.

98159

LIT 261 Growing Up Victorian

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 304

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies Victorian children come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. The readings include nursery rhymes, fairy and folk tales, didactic stories, autobiography, and some longer fiction e.g. Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays and Butler's Way of all Flesh.

98160

LIT 272 The Irish Renaissance

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

3:00 -4:20 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies The Irish Renaissance of the first few decades of the twentieth century was the creation of those cultural leaders who founded the Abbey Theatre to nourish a specifically Irish (not British, not European) imagination. The revival exploited three sources: the mythical Ireland of Celtic legend where Cuchulain, Maeve, Finn, and Fergus waged epic battles over cows and birthrights with the aid and interference of magic; western Ireland, poetry and story; and a political history that is a persistent record of invasion, oppression, and faction, and of heroic gestures accompanied by a mood of tragic failure. The course begins with a brief history of Ireland, concentrating on three discrete moments: the end of the seventeenth century and the battles of Boyne and Aughrim, the abortive rising of 1798, and the 1890s spirit of nationalistic renewal. Then we consider the Abbey Theatre and its reconstruction of the legends of the past and the use of idioms and characters of the west of Ireland, chiefly in the drama of Yeats and Synge. We will look at the development of these themes in the literature associated with the troubles of 1916‑22 and in later writings, which continue or challenge the themes of the Renaissance, including works by Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Flann O'Brien, and Brendan Behan.

98206

LIT 276B Chosen Voices: Jewish Authors

Elizabeth Frank

. . W Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 308

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies, SRE, Theology In this course we will read major nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish authors who, in their attempts sometimes to preserve Jewish tradition and just as often to break with it (or to do a little of both), managed to make a major contribution to secular Jewish culture. The struggle to create an imaginative literature by and about Jews is thus examined with respect to often conflicted literary approaches to questions of Jewish identity and history (including persistent anti-Semitism in the countries of the Diaspora and the catastrophe of the Holocaust). In the process we will discuss such notions as Jewish identity and stereotypes, questions of "apartness" and "insideness," and explore literary genres such as the novel, the tale, the fable, the folktale and the joke in relation to traditional forms of Jewish storytelling, interpretation and prophecy. We will look as well at what it is that makes "Jewish humor" both Jewish and funny and consider the consequences of a particular author's decision to write in either Hebrew or Yiddish, or in a language such as Russian, German or English. We will discuss as well Jewish participation in literary modernism. Authors include Rabbi Nachman of Bratzslav, Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Primo Levi, Isaac  Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Aharon Appelfeld, Leslie Epstein, and Angel Wagenstein."

98207

LIT 2882 Different Voices, Different Views

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 307

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights A close reading of selected plays, poems, and short stories by contemporary authors from North, West, and South Africa, Egypt, India and China. The course traces a variety of literary traditions and examines their intrinsic artistic merits. It analyzes the verisimilitude with which authors portray the tensions and problems experienced by their respective countries and people, old and young, as they come into contact with different worlds, values, and traditions, and the effect this has on daily existence, social and personal relationships, attitudes toward women, spiritual beliefs, and cultural life. Authors include: Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Nadine Gordimer, Sembene Ousmane, Nawal Saadawi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Africa); Cheng Naishan and Bei Dao (China); Anita Desai, Mahasweta Devi, Rabindranath Tagor, R.K. Narayan (India); Enchi Funiko (Japan); Hwong Sunwon (Korea); and Naguib Mahfouz (Middle East).