Historical studies in the Comparative, English, and American literature traditions are organized into sequences. (Please notify the instructor if you need a sequence course in order to moderate in the fall of 2008.)

 

98414

LIT 204B   Comparative Literature II

Gabriela Carrion

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLINLC 206

ELIT

This course will examine the literature from the Early Modern Period spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the intellectual and artistic expressions of the Renaissance and Baroque, we will consider a variety of genres including poetry, autobiography, novel and drama. The emergence of the self as a concept especially fraught with tensions as well as possibilities during this period will serve as a framework in which to address a number of questions. How does the self define itself in a hierarchical society? How are concepts such as nature and civilization, history and literature, hero and anti-hero, believer and heretic defined (and redefined) during this period? Taking Columbus’s diary as a point of departure, this course will explore literary texts in the context of such diverse events as the Protestant reformation, the encounter and subsequent colonization of the Americas, and the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire. Authors will include Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Calderón, Molière, Diderot and Voltaire.   

 

98241

LIT 204C   Comparative Literature III

Eric Trudel

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

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 Apollinaire, Balzac, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Dostoesky, Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Hofmannsthal, James, Kafka, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Novalis, Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde and Woolf.    

 

98213

LIT 250   English Literature I

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 309

ELIT

An intensive course in Medieval and Renaissance English literature which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of a critical vocabulary and imagination, and the discovery of some of the classic works which make up English literature from Beowulf and Chaucer to the major Elizabethans. Among the topics we will explore are the construction of the author (from "Anonymous" to Shakespeare), the British "nation"(imagined and partly created by the literature), and the urban, rural, monastic, and theatrical levels of society which literature sought to represent. Authors include the Beowulf poet, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, among others. The course is for new and continuing literature majors who want to explore the range and depth of English literature while they

fulfill program requirements.   

 

98151

LIT 252   English Literature III

Deirdre d'Albertis

. . W . F

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies   English Literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from  Austen, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley through Tennyson, Carlyle and  Ruskin to modernist writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and  Virginia Woolf.   

 

98205

LIT 257   Literature of the U.S. I:

Cross-Referencing the Puritans

Elizabeth Frank

. . W Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies    Writings from the first three generations of Puritan settlement in seventeenth-century Massachusetts are closely examined not only in relation to each other but also to later American texts bearing persistent traces of Puritan concerns.  We will explore such essential Puritan obsessions as the authority of divinely authored Scripture, original sin, predestination, election, free grace, "the city on a hill," and covenanted relations between mankind and God.  Our focus will be the contradictory and problematic features of Puritan culture as they find expression in Puritan literature, with its predilection for the plain style, figurative language, the rhetoric of religious emotion, and the construction of the radically individual self.  Authors include notable Puritan divines, poets, historians and citizens, as well as later writers, among them Jonathan Edwards, Washington Irving, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Robert Lowell.   

 

98211

LIT 258   Literature of the U.S. II

Geoffrey Sanborn

. . W . F

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed:  American Studies   A study of the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century.  These writers will spray us outward into an almost unlimited number of related topics: the politics of westward expansion, the cult of domesticity, the slavery crisis, the rise of mass entertainment, the  materiality of language, and the nature of unconscious experience, to  name a few. Although each of these fields is interesting in its own right, we will always begin from and return to the experience of literature, on the assumption that this experience is so strange, so  variable, and so little understood that it deserves our closest  attention. Writers include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, and Stoddard.