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.