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

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 2009.)

99093

LIT 204A Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

4:00 -5:20 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies How does a medieval or Renaissance text mean? What is the logic according to which it functions? How can we, as modern readers, enter into that logic? In this course, we will engage in a series of close readings of important texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and try to gain access to their strange textual world. We will attempt to make sense of birds who sing hymns, wolves who become human beings, suicides who become trees, a man by the name of Petrarch who fears that, because of love, he is being petrified, and a woman by the name of Ginevra who becomes a man and a counselor to the sultan. In these lyric poems, lays, romances, epics, and tales, metamorphoses are not just themes, integral to these texts’ content, but structures, integral to their form, and, as such, they lie at the heart of how these texts function. Works to be read include the Carmina Burana, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the lays of Marie de France, Arthurian romance, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

99075

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

This course explores developments in European and American literature from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century—a period marked by the effects of the French and American Revolutions, the Enlightenment, industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, two world wars, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of identity in a global context. Throughout the seminar, we will discuss critical issues such as the self, aesthetics, revolution, and reaction as they emerge and are refigured by the literary text. Readings will include works by Shelley, de Staël, Hölderlin, Emerson, Flaubert, Mann, James, Baudelaire, Beckett, Celan, Borges, and Ashbery.

99079

LIT 250 English Literature I

Nancy Leonard

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed: Theology 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.

99108

LIT 252 English Literature III

Terence Dewsnap

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

HEG 200

ELIT

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

99089

LIT 257 Literature of the U.S. I

Geoffrey Sanborn

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

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.

99060

LIT 258 Literature of the U.S. II

Elizabeth Antrim

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 201

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, and Dickinson.