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 2011.)

91285

LIT 204B Comparative Literature II

Marina van Zuylen

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 204

ELIT

This course will span literary texts from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.  It will examine Humanism's impact on the formation of selfhood; the crisis of authority in Spanish and French classical drama; the influence of Commedia del Arte on Italian theater; and idealist philosophy on the emergence of German Romanticism.  We will dwell on the invention of autobiography, Cartesian and anti-Cartesian body-mind duality, the waning conception of heroism, the Enlightenment and its enemies, and comedy's role in bringing the everyday to the center of the literary experience. Authors will include Montaigne, Castiglione, Molière, Madame de la Fayette, Goldoni, Sor Inés de la Cruz, Descartes, Rousseau, Schiller, and Goethe. Class size: 22

91554

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III

Thomas Keenan

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

RKC 102

ELIT

This course examines the complex Euro-American literary transformation that stretches from what is loosely named Romanticism to the edge of the 20th century. 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 relations 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. Class size: 22

91119

LIT 250 English Literature I

Nancy Leonard

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 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. Class size: 20

91287

LIT 252 English Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century—a period marked by the effects of the French and American Revolutions, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, two world wars, the development of regional identities within Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of "Britishness" in a global context. Beginning with the "Romantics" and ending with avant garde English poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of Britain, conservatism versus radicalism, the empire, and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. The centerpiece of the course is close reading—of poetry, prose, essays, and plays. 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. Class size: 22

91296

LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III

Matthew Mutter

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies This course tracks the development of American literature from the late nineteenth century to World War II. We will explore new literary movements such as regionalism and naturalism; we will be particularly concerned with modernism in its various manifestations. Along the way we will attend to a number of political and social developments (westward expansion, U.S. imperialism, WWI, Jim Crow, first-wave feminism, urbanization) as well as certain cultural and intellectual revolutions (the rise of the social sciences, the proliferation of mass media and the commodification of culture, secularization, Social Darwinism) that the literature of the time both absorbed and engaged. Writers likely to be covered include Twain, Crane, James, Cather, Larsen, Toomer, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Frost Pound, Eliot, and Loy. Class size: 22

91112

LIT 260 Literature of the U. S. IV

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . . . . . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm 10:10 - 11:30 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies In the wake of World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant military, economic, and cultural power. That power, diffused into the lives of individual Americans by technological, political, and social change, simultaneously deepened a sense of powerlessness for some and fulfilled hopes and expectations for others: if you imaginatively identified with the nation and its privileged symbols—for example, whiteness, masculinity, weaponry, and material plenty—would you experience the promised sense of centrality and significance seemingly mandated by our military triumph, our wealth, our extraordinary global prestige, and our historical sense of providential destiny? Or would you experience, or even be aware of, America’s failure to deliver on its promises? In this course, we will be looking at the ways in which American literature imagined and represented what it was like to live American lives between August 6, 1945, and September 11, 2001, the day when American verities and pieties underwent a sudden reckoning. We will begin by asking ourselves and our writers the same question with which R.W. Emerson opens his great essay, "Experience": "Where do we find ourselves?" and go on to examine works by mid-to late twentieth-century and contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Moreover we shall do so through explicit reference to traditions and problems addressed by the first three courses in the United States literature sequence. Can we still see ourselves as the "City on a Hill"? What has happened to the democratic faith of Emerson and Whitman? Do we possess a "usable past"? Is ours a society marked by "quiet desperation"? Readings vary each time the course is given; authors may include but are not necessarily confined to Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and others. NOTE: US Literature IV may be used to satisfy the literature program’s moderation requirement IF AND ONLY IF the student has already taken US Lit I or US Lit II. You will not be permitted to moderate into literature if you have only taken US Lit III and US Lit IV. The course will, however, be open to already-moderated students and students who do not plan to moderate into the literature program Class size: 20