|
91296 |
LIT 140 Introduction
to Media |
Maria
Sachiko Cecire |
. T . Th . |
11:50 -1:10 pm |
OLIN 201 |
HUM |
Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Science, Technology,
& Society This course offers a foundation in media history
and theory, with a focus on how to use aspects of traditional humanistic
approaches such as close reading and visual literacy to critically engage with
both traditional and new media. The work of theorists such as Walter Benjamin,
Jean Baudrillard, Katherine Hayles,
Henry Jenkins, Friedrich Kittler, and Marshall McLuhan will guide our
discussions as we consider how media frame and shape humanistic texts, from
medieval manuscripts to the transmediated narratives
of the internet age. Topics to be covered include print culture, the rise of
the motion picture and electronic media, algorithms and hypermedia, and what
Jenkins has called the convergence culture of today. As part of our ongoing
examinations of how material conditions shape discourse, we will assess our own
positions as users, consumers, and potential producers of media. Class
size: 18
|
91700 |
LIT 145 The Iliad
of Homer: An Intensive Reading |
Daniel
Mendelsohn |
. T . . . |
1:30
3:50 pm |
RKC
103 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Classical
Studies This course will
consist of an intensive reading of Homers Iliad
over the course of a single semester.
The course, which mimics the design of a graduate seminara single,
two-and-a-half-hour meeting each week, focusing on in-depth discussion and
textual explication, with a heavy emphasis on how to write critically about a
literary textis designed to introduce first-year students to more profound and
sophisticated techniques of reading and thinking about texts than they will
have thus far encountered. After two
prefatory sessions, in which students will be introduced to the large issues
particular both to this genre (the archaic Greek world, oral composition, the
Homeric Question) and to this particular text (the epic cycle, the heroic
code, violence and warfare, the clash of civilizations, East vs. West, the
role of the gods in human history), we will read through the epic at a rate of
two books per week. Throughout, students will be introduced, by means of
excerpts and shorter articles, to the arc of the scholarly tradition,
especially with respect to the Homeric Question: from Wolfs Prolegomenon to Homer to M. L. Wests
recent argument that the Iliad was,
in fact, written down by a single author/poet. Two summary sessions will
conclude the semester as we (a) look at the classical heritage of the Iliad (the Aeneid,
especially) and then (b) look back at the broad literary and cultural issues
raised by this essential document of the Western tradition, and look at some
modern adaptations (Logues War Music, for instance; also attempts to
dramatize the Iliadand why they so
often fail). A premium will be placed on
student participation in class discussion, and each student will be asked to
present a book of the poem (focusing on structural analysis, interpretative
issues, etc.) to the class. At least three papers, midterm, final exam. This course is designed for First-Year
Students. Class size: 22
|
91290 |
LIT 2002 Americans
Abroad |
Donna
Grover |
. T . Th . |
11:50 -1:10 pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies,
American Studies Post World War I was
an exciting time for American artists who chose to come of age and discover their
own American-ness from other shores. We will read writers of the so-called
Lost Generation including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott
Fitzgerald. But in our reexamination of The Lost Generation we will also
include expatriate writers best known for their participation in the Harlem
Renaissance, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset. The
African-American presence in Europe which included the iconic figure Josephine
Baker as well as jazz great Louis Armstrong altered this picture in ways that
we are only beginning to appreciate. This course looks at a period in which
American culture found roots abroad. Class size: 22
|
91255 |
LIT 2031 Ten Plays
that Shook the World |
Justus
Rosenberg |
M . W . . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
French Studies, Theater
A close reading
and textual analysis of plays considered
milestones in the history of the theater.
In this course we isolate and examine the artistic, social and
psychological components that made these works become part of the literary
canon. Have they lasted because they
conjure up fantasies of escape, or make its readers and viewers face dilemmas
inherent in certain social conditions or archetypical conflicts? What was it exactly that made them so
shocking when first preformed? The language, theme, style, staging? We also explore the theatre as a literary
genre that goes beyond the writing. For
a meaningful and effective performance, all aspects of the play, directing,
acting, staging, lighting will be considered.
Class size: 22
|
91679 |
LIT 2035 Religion and the Secular in Literary Modernism |
Matthew
Mutter |
. T . Th . |
11:50 1:10 pm |
RKC 101 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies, Religion, Theology
This
course seeks to understand the intricate relations between religion and
literature in modern culture. We will
ask questions such as: Can literature
become a substitute for religion? Is
poetic consciousness connected to religious consciousness? How does secularism impact the way writers
think about the nature of language or the experience of pain? We will examine how certain modernists looked
to paganism as a form of religious feeling tied to the fortunes of the body;
how some saw poetic speech as a form of magic; and how others hoped to employ
language to attune consciousness to mystical realities. Lastly, we will explore how certain literary
genres foster religious or secular attitudes towards human experience. Texts will include Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop,
Nathanael Wests Miss Lonelyhearts,
T.S. Eliots Four Quartets, Jean Toomers Cane,
stories by Flannery OConnor and poems by Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. Class
size: 18
|
91233 |
LIT 2037 Childhood
and Children's Literature in Japan |
Mika
Endo |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 201 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies This course
examines the ubiquity of the child figure in literary and cultural production
in modern Japan. By examining key representations of societys youngest members
as well as works intended for children themselves, we will explore 1) ways that
the experience of Japanese modernity was articulated through the lens of the
child and 2) the critical reception of childrens literature and culture as it
developed into an independent field of production. As we revisit major trends
of Japans twentieth century, we will think about the historical conditions
that made it seem possible and necessary to invest material and intellectual
resources toward the construction of a culture for children. These issues will
be considered through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad range of
texts, including short fiction, fairy tales, animated films, manga, and other forms of media such as Japanese kamishibai (paper theater). The
major focus of this course is on Japanese cultural production through writers
such as Higuchi Ichiyo, Kawabata Yasunari,
Oe Kenzaburo, and Yoshimoto Banana, but it will also
include some theorists and writers outside Japan. Conducted
in English. This course counts as
a World Literature offering. Class
size: 20
|
91867 |
LIT 2086 Modern
Tragedy |
Benjamin
La Farge |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
All
tragedies see the human condition as doomed; but in classical Greek tragedy the
protagonist's fate, usually signified by an oracle, is externalized as
something beyond human control, whereas in modern tragedy, starting with
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw
in the protagonist's character. Since
then the modern protagonist has increasingly been seen as a helpless victim of
circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is
sometimes externalized as history, war, or society, sometimes internalized, but
in either case the protagonist has been reduced in stature, so that 20th
century tragedy can only be called ironic--a far cry from the heroic tragedy of
ancient Greece. In tracing this complex
history, including the disappearance and revival of the chorus, we will examine
tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky (his novel
Crime and Punishment), Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and
Miller, all of which will be scrutinized in the light of major theories by
Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others. Class size: 15
|
91241 |
LIT 209 Major
American Poets |
Benjamin
La Farge |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies American poetry found its own voice in the
first half of the 19th century when
Emerson challenged American "scholars" to free themselves from
tradition. For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt
Whitman to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, acknowledged Emerson as a crucial
inspiration. Emerson himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and
Edgar Allan Poe, were the first to achieve international fame, but it was in
Whitman's poems that a distinctively American voice was first heard--a voice
that was both oracular and plain-spoken. At the same time, the oddly metered,
introspective poems of Emily Dickinson, mostly unpublished during her lifetime,
spoke in a New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American.
Then, only thirty years after her death, the powerful modern voices of T.S.
Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos
Williams, Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, and Hart Crane began to be heard. We
will read selective poems by each of these, and we will also give equal time to
Frost, the great contrarian poet who was dismissed by some as anti-modern but
is now acknowledged as one of the greatest. Class
size: 15
|
91253 |
LIT 216 Victorian
Myth, Fantasy and the Art of Detection |
Terence
Dewsnap |
. T . Th . |
11:50 -1:10 pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies Extensive reading in the poets Browning and Tennyson. Fiction by
Disraeli, George MacDonald, Wilkie Collins, Morris,
Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle. Class size: 15
|
91349 |
LIT 218 Free Speech |
Thomas
Keenan |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
HEG 106 |
HUM |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights (Core Course ) An
introduction to debates about freedom of expression. The course will examine the
ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in
ideas about democracy. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say
anything? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from,
and what it has had to do in particular with literature. What powers does
speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? In asking about the status of the speaking
human subject, we will ask about the ways in which the subject of rights, and
indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives
from a 'literary' experience. These questions will be examined, if not
answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political
texts, including case studies and readings in contemporary critical and legal
theory. Class size: 22
|
91254 |
LIT 2186 Irish
Traditions of Comedy |
Terence
Dewsnap |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
RKC 122 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies Irish and
Anglo-Irish inventions of comedy, from medieval bards with their magical and
satiric language to modern writers like Marina Carr and Paul Durcan. Other writers include Swift, Merryman,
Edgeworth, Boucicault, Synge, Joyce, OCasey, Behan,
Molly Keane and Flann OBrien. Class size: 15
|
91460 |
LIT 2187 An
Introduction to Poetics |
Ann
Lauterbach |
. T . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLIN 107 |
ELIT |
In
broad terms, poetics refers to ideas
around the making of, and criteria for, artistic form. How is a poem a poem? We
will examine how certain linguistic elements, including prosody, syntax,
diction, grammar and lineation, affect the writing and reading of poems; we
will ask how historical, social and individual contexts might affect a poets
formal choices, and examine the ambiguity between subjective and objective
theories of poetic creation and critical judgment. We will question the
possibility of interpretive validity in a world of continuous informational
flow. Class size: 15
|
91710 |
LIT 2188 New African
Writing from the 21st Century:The Contemporary Short Story |
Binyavanga
Wainaina |
. T . Th . |
11:50 1:10 pm |
HEG 204 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed
Africana Studies This class will
look at a selection of the most innovative African writers of the short story
form in English and in translation. We will focus on writers born after the
independence movements in the 1960s, and writers based on the continent and
elsewhere. There will be close readings of selected texts by writers like Igoni Barret, Chimamanda
Adichie, Waigwa Ndiagui, Iheoma Nwachukwu and others. Students will be expected to do quite
a bit of their own background research on each writer, and some understanding
of the places they write from or about to give context to the reading of their
work. This course is writing intensive. There will be a 15 page term project to
submit at the end of term. Class size. 20
|
91770 |
LIT 2189 Nineteenth-Century
Fictions of American Selfhood |
Alex
Benson |
M . W . . |
11:50 - 1:10 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
In
most books, writes Henry David Thoreau in the opening of Walden, the I, or first person, is omitted. But the use of the
first-person singular plays a crucial and multifarious role not only in
Thoreaus text but across the field of nineteenth-century American literature.
In this course well investigate the relationship between first-person
discourse and the imagination of identity, reading works of autobiography,
slave narrative, fiction, poetry, and philosophy in order to see how they
grapple with the problem of invoking a self through the medium of a text. Why
does this mode of address become so important to certain intellectual and
aesthetic projects? And what are the political and social conditions that allow
one (or dont) to express oneself in the first person singular? Authors include
Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Class size. 18
|
91374 |
LIT 219 The Sonnet |
Philip
Pardi |
. . W . F |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
HEG 300 |
ELIT |
Since its
emergence in the 13th century, the sonnet has proven to be a popular, resilient,
yet malleable form. In this course well trace the development of the sonnet,
in English and in translation. Well consider its formal aspects, as well as
the way poets have worked within and against such constraints, and well
investigate what role the sonnet might have played in the development of
English poetry. Poets will include Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sor Juana, Clare, Barrett Browning, Rilke, Berrigan, Mayer, Hahn, Lerner, and others. This class will
focus on close reading, and students should be prepared to write frequently,
both in class and out. Class size: 18
|
91712 |
LIT 2191 Modern
Metropolis Tokyo: Literature, Media & Urban Space |
Nathan
Shockey |
M . W . . |
1:30
2:50 pm |
HEG
201 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies This class explores
representations of the megalopolis of Tokyo, the largest agglomeration of
people in the history of human civilization. By working with a variety of
literary texts, photographs, films, maps, and other media, we will address the
cultural history of modern Tokyo while discussing larger concerns about the
relationships between social experience and city space. How do people make
sense of the shifting fields of sensation and information that constitute life
in the worlds biggest city? How can the experiences and emotions germane to
metropolitan life be expressed, communicated, and understood? We will think
together about the ways in which people and cities can and do change each
other, and how techniques of imagining, creating, and living in modern cities
have changed over time. All readings are in English and include works by Nagai Kaf, Tanizaki Junichir, Akutagawa Rynosuke, Abe Kb, Tatsumi Yoshihiro, and other Japanese authors in addition to
writings by urban theorists such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel,
David Harvey, and Lewis Mumford. Class size: 18
|
91771 |
LIT 2193 Raised by
Wolves: Literary Wild Children and the Limits of the Human |
Alex
Benson |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLIN 305 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Human Rights In
this course, well track the strange careers of wild children, fugitives,
vagabonds, foundlings, and the occasional talking animal. Whats common to this
eclectic set of figuresor rather to the narratives well read about themis
their way of troubling some of the distinctions often drawn between the human
and the nonhuman, civilization and wilderness, culture and nature.
Enlightenment philosophy provides a traditional context for thinking abut the
significance of the feral child, and well take Jean-Jacques Rousseaus
reflections on savagery and the state of nature as a starting point. From
there, though, well range broadly. Well attend closely to several works by
nineteenth-century American writers; in a period characterized by chattel
slavery, westward expansion, and emergent evolutionary thinking, the figure
that straddles the human-nonhuman divide takes on a peculiar urgency. And well
also consider the appearance of the wild child in several more recent works
that tend toward the fantastical, from a 1929 novel about children taken by
pirates to a 2006 story about girls raised by wolves. Authors include Frederick
Douglass, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Franz Kafka, Richard Hughes, Edward Gorey, Karen Russell, and Steven Millhauser,
among others. Class size: 18
|
91358 |
LIT 2204 World
Literature & the CIA |
Elizabeth
Holt |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 308 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights LAIS, Middle Eastern Studies In 1950, the
Central Intelligence Agency clandestinely created the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, administered from London with its main offices in Paris, in order to
foster what it deemed the "Non-Communist Left" through a global
network of conferences, concerts, exhibitions, and influential literary
magazines. Covertly disseminating a Cold War cultural politics and aesthetics
that sought to untether literature from politics, the
Congress underwrote a world literary canon that the world literature anthology
and classroom inherits and keeps in circulation (including authors such as
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Tayyeb Salih, James Baldwin, Pablo Neruda, Yusuf Idris, Wole Soyinka, Chinua
Achebe, and William Faulkner) . In this course,
we will read selected poetry, short stories, novels, and essays published
in the Congress's journals between 1950 and its scandalous collapse in 1967,
looking in particular at the London-based Encounter, the Beirut-based Hiwar, the Latin American Mundo Nuevo, Uganda's Transition, as well as histories of the
Congress, and reports the Rand Corporation has recently prepared for the United
States Department of Defense, as we consider the legacy of this global
intelligence plot to use literature in the furtherance of empire. This course counts as a World Literature
offering. Class size: 22
|
92184 |
LIT 2226 A Pan Africa is Possible: Ten Years of Chimurenga
Magazines Revolutionary Aesthetic |
Binyavanga Wainaina |
. T . Th . |
3:10 4:30
pm |
HEG 308 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies Pan-Africani sm is a political
movement that seeks to unify African people or people living in Africa. In
December 2011, The Prince Claus Foundation awarded Chimurenga
its grand prize for "challenging established ideas and stimulating pan
African culture with an unwavering commitment to intellectual autonomy,
diversity and freedom." This class will examine ten years of Chimurenga Magazines revolutionary aesthetic. This class
will focus on a close reading of the whole editions and selected extracts from
16 issues of Cape Town based Chimurenga magazine
dating back to 2002 when the magazine was founded. We will also examine various
Chimurenga and Chinu
related media: video, audio, music and blogs used as part of the online
magazine. This 200 level course will also serve as an introduction to
contemporary African writing since the late 1990s.Through these readings, we
will discover the political, social and aesthetic world Chimurenga
has proposed for a new generation of cosmopolitan Africans on the continent and
around the world. Though set in South Africa, and fully immersed in Cape Town, Chimurengas bold vision has managed present a pungent and
dynamic aesthetic that has influenced African artists and intellectuals all
over the world.
Class
size: 20
|
91281 |
LIT 2236 Reading
Resistance and Revolution in the Arab
World |
Dina
Ramadan |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 201 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Experimental
Humanities; Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies With the recent uprisings in the Arab
world, much attention has been given to the role of writers and artists in
political movements. Beginning with anti-colonial resistance movements of the
early 20th century, this course will survey the changing
understanding and expectations of the literary and cultural production in the
region. Iltizam
or literary commitment, a translation of Jean Paul Sartres notion of
engagement, became a central concept during the decades of postcolonial
nation-building when there was a profound confidence in literature and art as
tools for representing and transforming socio-political realities. By the 1970s
however, there was an increasing mistrust of the traditional narrative
structure central to the social realism of previous generations. This political
disillusionment was reflected in a range of stylistic and aesthetic shifts in
the decades that follow. We will begin by reading some of the foundational
committed texts, such as Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawis The Earth, before moving on to more contested
and experimental works such as Ghassan
Kanafanis All
That is Left to You, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's In Search of Walid Masoud. We will also
focus on the role of poetry, particularly colloquial poetry, in chronicling
popular resistance. Finally, we will consider literary and artistic works
produced the last few years, thinking about the ways in which they reflect a
shift in understandings of writers, artists, resistance, and revolution. All
readings will be in English. This course counts as a World Literature
offering. Class size: 22
|
91262 |
LIT 2243 How to Use
the Language |
Francine
Prose |
. . . . F |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Human Rights In
this course we will examine how language is used (badly and well, and for a
wide range of reasons) by great writers and by the daily papers, by advertising
and TV. How does language create character, reproduce everyday speech, suggests
meaning, describe consciousness, form our social and political views, and
change our attitudes and preconceptions? The reading list will include stories,
novels and memoirs by writers including the following: Tolstoy, Chekhov,
Cheever, Flaubert, Isaac Babel, Katherine Mansfield, Roberto Bolano, Mavis Gallant, Jo Ann Beard, Anne Ernaux, and Jennifer Egan. Two short papers a week will be
required. Application is by email to [email protected]
explaining the students reason for wanting to take the class. Please dont use
my Bard email address. Class size: 15
|
91283 |
LIT 2261 Blurring the Boundaries: Magical Realism in World Literature |
Melanie
Nicholson |
M . W . . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 303 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: LAIS When the
Latin American Boom novel exploded onto the international literary scene in
the 1960s, it brought to prominence a narrative mode known as magical realism.
Alternately incorporating magical events into quotidian reality and sometimes
brutal political and social realities into mythical realms, magical realism presents itselfas some
critics have arguedas a particularly apt mode of expression for third-world
or postcolonial societies, or for marginalized populations in any locale. In
this course we will first consider the Latin American origins of magical
realism, then examine its varied manifestations in
novels from Africa to India to the United States. We will use narrative theory
to disentangle the multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions of magical
realist prose. Authors may include Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo,
Gabriel Garca Mrquez,
Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Ben Okri, Salmon Rushdie, Angela Carter, D.M. Thomas, Tahar ben Jelloun,
and Toni Morrison. This course counts as
a World Literature offering. Class
size: 18
|
91284 |
LIT 2311 St. Petersburg:
City, Monument, Text |
Olga
Voronina |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 202 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Russian & Eurasian Studies, Environmental
& Urban Studies Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers
built St. Petersburg, but it was the writers who put it on the cultural map of
the world. Founded on the outskirts of the empire, the city served as a missing
link between enlightened Europe and barbaric Asia, between the turbulent
past of the Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered to be too
cold, too formal, too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg harbored
revolutionary ideas and terrorist movements that threatened to explode from
within. While its granite quays were erected to withstand the assault of the
floods, some of its most famous monuments, including literary works, resisted
the onset of new, radical ideologies.
In this course, we will study the conflicting nature of the city as reflected
in literature and literary criticism. The poems and novels on our reading list
will provide a sweeping overview of Russias literary canon in the 19th and
20th centuries, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and from Gogol to Bely and Nabokov.
After exploring Queen of Spades, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, we will move on to Petersburg and The Defense, thus undertaking a journey through Russias literary
tradition and the urban landscape of the north with the authors who either
reconstructed St. Petersburg in their memory or re-visited it in their
imaginations. Class size: 22
|
91409 |
LIT 2324 Freudian Psychoanalysis, Language, and
Literature |
Helena
Gibbs |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 302 |
ELIT |
The understanding that language inhabits the
human subject is essential to Sigmund Freuds conception of the unconscious. It
is Freud who taught us to read slips of the tongue, bungled actions, memory
lapses, and dreamswhat he calls formations of the unconsciousas speech in
their own right. Throughout his work he
demonstrates that speech implicates us at a level far beyond what we typically
consider communication. By singling out
certain properties of language (e.g., a word signifying a variety of meanings),
Freud scrutinizes its ability to structure us as subjects. Selections from Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams, Studies
on Hysteria, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
and The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life will serve as a point of departure for a broader examination of
Freudian psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. These texts will be complemented with
writings by Jacques Lacan and other authors whose
works shed further light on the subject of the Freudian unconscious, among them
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and Claude
Lvi-Strauss. A particular focus of the course will be the intersection of
Freudian theory with literature and poetry.
The authors will include Heinrich von Kleist, Stphane
Mallarm, Ren Crevel, W.
G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Javier Maras. Class
size: 15
|
91725 |
LIT 2404 Fantastic
Journeys and the Modern World |
Jonathan
Brent |
. . W . . |
4:40 7:00 pm |
OLIN 309 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Russian & Eurasian Studies; Related
interest: STS The
modern world has been characterized in many ways, as a time of unimaginable
freedom, as well as existential angst, exile, loss of the idea of home, loss of
the idea of positive heroes; a triumphant embracing of the new and the
future, as well as the troubling encounter with machines and the menace of
totalitarianism. It was a time when barriers of all sorts began to
crumblebarriers between past and present, foreground and background, high and
low culture, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Artists and writers
responded in many different ways across the world. The writers we will read in
this class represent the fulcrum of creativity in America, Central or Eastern
Europe and Russia. Each lived at a different axis of modernitywhere East
met West, where the Russian Revolution provided a vibrant but terrifying image
of liberation, where modern technological innovation produced endless
possibilities of satirization of both the old world
and the new, where ethnic and genocidal violence was developing under the
surface of this innovation into the foreseeable European Holocaust. These
writers have something powerful and unique to say about the advent of the
modern period in the fantastic parallel worlds they created where machines take
on lives of their own, grotesque transformations violate the laws of science,
and inversions of normality become the norm. Through their fantastic
conceptions a vision of modernity emerges which questions the most basic
presumptions of western civilizationin art, morality, politics, the psyche and
social lifea vision for which the West still has no satisfying response. All
readings are in English. We will read The
Marvelous Land of Oz (L. Frank Baum),
The Metamorphosis (Kafka), RUR (Capek), War with the Newts (Capek),
Street of Crocodiles (Schulz),
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass
(Schulz), Envy (Olesha)
The Bedbug (Mayakovsky).
There will be 4 short papers for the course & one final paper. Class
size: 15
|
91260 |
LIT 2501 Shakespeare |
Nancy
Leonard |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Too
often Shakespeare is less exclaimed over than dentally drilled: this course promises
to remedy that by a close reading of seven great plays, spread over the various
kinds of play he wrote: comedy, history, tragedy and romance. We will find out how characters enact our
contemporary concerns with issues like politics, sexuality, gender, and race,
but also how they appeared within their own historical framework. For instance, knowing how limited the
prospects of early modern European women were, even aristocrats, creates new
admiration for Shakespeares bold and quirky comic heroines. Our primary focus is literary, but we will
draw on critical readings, theater history, film and performance work. Plays to be read include A Midsummer Nights Dream, Romeo and
Juliet, 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, and
The Tempest. Open to all students. This
course counts as pre-1800 offering.
Class size: 22
|
91210 |
LIT 2601 American
Literature 1945-2012 |
Elizabeth
Frank |
. . W . . . . . Th . |
11:50 -1:10 pm 10:10 - 11:30 am |
ASP 302 ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
American Studies In the wake of World War
II, the United States emerged as the worlds 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 symbolsfor
example, whiteness, masculinity, weaponry, and material plentywould 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, Americas 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 bequeathed to
us by American writing from the seventeenth-century on. 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. Class size: 20
|
91223 |
LIT 2603 Scholasticism
vs. Humanism |
Karen
Sullivan |
. T . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights, Medieval Studies, Theology Throughout the Middle Ages,
intellectual life was dominated by scholastics, who sought to integrate reason
and faith, logic and revelation, classical philosophy and the Christian
Gospels. For many of these thinkers, the City of Man, in which we now live,
should ideally mirror the City of God, in which we hope one day to reside: both
are single, unified, exquisitely ordered and hierarchical structures, in which
the individual part is harmoniously integrated into the greater whole. During the Renaissance, however, intellectual
discourse was taken over by humanists, who stressed empiricism over
abstraction, rhetoric over dialectic, and Plato over Aristotle as the means of
access to truth. With experience now privileged over logic, the personal,
subjective perception expressed in literature became prized over the
impersonal, seemingly objective cosmos of philosophy. In this seminar, we will be exploring the
tension between scholastic and humanist thought against the background of the
rise of the university, the shift from Gothic to Renaissance architecture, the
discovery of the New World, and the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, as
well as within the context of more recent historical eras. Authors to be read include Augustine,
Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and
Descartes. This course counts as
pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22
|
91289 |
LIT 2670 Women
Writing the Caribbean |
Donna
Grover |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Gender
& Sexuality Studies The
creolized culture of the Caribbean has been a hotbed of womens writing from
the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes creolization as
nowhere purely African, but a mosaic of African, European, and indigenous
responses to a truly novel reality. This course is concerned with how women,
through fiction, interpreted that reality. While confronting the often
explosive politics of post-colonial island life and at the same time navigating
the presence of French, English, and African influence, women
saw their role as deeply conflicted. We will begin with The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Other writers will
include Martha Gelhorn, Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Jamaica Kincaid,
Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat. This
course counts as a World Literature offering.
Class size: 22