LITERATURE SEQUENCE COURSES:

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 2012.)

91216

LIT 204B Comparative Literature II

Marina van Zuylen

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 203

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, Molire, Madame de la Fayette, Goldoni, Sor Ins de la Cruz, Descartes, Rousseau, Schiller, and Goethe. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22

91218

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III

Eric Trudel

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLINLC 208

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, Lautramont, Mallarm, Novalis, Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde and Woolf. Class size: 22

91207

LIT 250 English Literature I

Marisa Libbon

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 107

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. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 18

91704

LIT 252 English Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN LC 210

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth centurya 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 readingof 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

91708

LIT 258 American Literature II

Matthew Mutter

. T . Th .

3:10 4:30 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Crosslisted: American Studies This course explores the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century and seeks to sharpen student capacities for close reading and historical contextualization. Careful attention to important texts will open onto considerations of a variety of topics: the legacy of Puritanism, the politics of westward expansion and the figurations of wilderness, the slavery crisis, American transformations of Romanticism, and democratic poetics. Writers include Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Dickinson. Class size: 18

91709

LIT 259 American Literature III

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

1:30 -2:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by working out the relationship between a series of literary movementsrealism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernismand a series of epochal historical events: among them, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the corporation, the Indian Wars, imperialism, the New Woman, new technologies, the birth of modern consumerism, the trauma of World War I, anxiety over immigration, and the various hedonisms of the so-called Jazz Age. While writing (and rewriting) this macro-narrative with our left hands, we will be writing a micro-narrative with our right hands, in which we attend not to vast social panoramas but to the moment-to-moment unfolding of each writers art. Authors include Twain, Crane, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Millay, and Faulkner. Class size: 20