|
91523 |
LIT 140 Introduction
to Media |
Maria
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: 20
|
91533 |
LIT 2031 Ten Plays
that Shook the World |
Justus
Rosenberg |
M . W . . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
French Studies, Theater
(World
Literature offering) 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: 20
|
91528 |
LIT 2039 Nature Fakers: Environment in
American Literature |
Alexandre
Benson |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 202 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental & Urban
Studies This course takes the
first part of its title from a 1907 essay by Theodore Roosevelt. He was
weighing in on a running literary-critical debate about whether nature writers
ought to represent animal life realistically. The President said yes; the
debate died down. In this course we will revive it, for two reasons. First,
Roosevelt’s essay begins to suggest the importance of the nature-writing
tradition—in which we will read widely, from Henry David Thoreau to Annie
Dillard—to certain forms of national self-imagination. Second, the questions
about representation and the nonhuman that were at play in the nature-fakers
debate remain far from settled in critical thought today. We will therefore
supplement our reading of nature writing with recent scholarship that
interrogates the very idea of “nature,” connecting the question of its
authenticity to the politics of race, gender, and species. Authors
likely to include John Burroughs, Donna Haraway,
Vicki Hearne, Thomas Jefferson, Aldo Leopold, Timothy Morton, John Muir, Harryette Mullen, and. E. B. White. Class
size: 20
|
91907 |
LIT 2014 The Novel
in English II: Education and Its
Discontents |
Deirdre
d'Albertis |
. T . Th . |
1:30 - 2:50 pm |
OLIN 306 |
ELIT |
In
this course we will study the English novel as integrally connected to
nineteenth-century debates surrounding education (debates that in many ways
continue to characterize our conceptions of teaching and learning). What
does it mean to become an educated person? Who is educable and who is
not? With the advent of educational reform in the period, both working-class
men and women of all classes sought (and began to gain) access to institutions
of higher learning. How might formal schooling be understood either to
help or to hinder individual growth and development? Authors considered
will be Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hughes, George Eliot, and
Thomas Hardy. Key texts include: Hard Times, Great Expectations,
and Our Mutual Friend (if time permits), Jane Eyre, Villette, The Mill on the Floss,
Tom Brown’s School Days and Jude the Obscure. Class size: 18
|
91530 |
LIT 2050 Blues,
Spirituals and the 20th Century African American Novel |
Donna
Grover |
. T . Th . |
11:50 -1:10 pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Gender
& Sexuality Studies African
American Spirituals and Blues music share fundamental musical structures, however they offer very different
narratives. Spirituals detail a transitory existence marked by suffering
that culminates in a celebratory ascendance into heaven. While the blues
often feature stories of anger, hurt and earthly survival is the only cause for
celebration. In this course we will explore the critical influence these
musical forms had on African American writers of the twentieth century. Writers
such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison used these musical
traditions to shape their narratives and to interrogate experience. James
Cone maintains that both blues and spirituals “preserve black humanity through
ritual and drama” and the same could be said of the Post-Reconstruction African American novel. Among the novels we will
read are: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man; Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God; Black Boy by Richard Wright and Devil in a Blue
Dress by Walter Mosely. Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Willie Dixon
are among the musicians included in our inquiry. Class
size: 18
|
91539 |
LIT 2065 Romantic-era
Poetry and Drama, 1750-1850 |
Cole
Heinowitz |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLINLC 206 |
ELIT |
This course
offers a critical introduction to the poetry and drama produced in Britain
during the turbulent century that witnessed the Enclosure Acts,
industrialization, the American and French Revolutions, the impeachment of
Warren Hastings, the Napoleonic Wars, abolition, and the Reform Bill. Our central focus will be on British authors
(including Gray, Crabbe, Baillie, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron,
Beddoes, Clare, and Landon), though we will also attend to key European
influences and interlocutors such as Diderot, Goethe, Rousseau, and Hölderlin. Along the way, we will reevaluate the standard
historical, intellectual, and aesthetic divisions that separate Enlightenment
from Romantic thought, Sensibility from Romanticism, tradition from innovation,
the self from the other, and the page from the stage. Class
size: 20
|
91504 |
LIT 2081 Mass
Culture of Postwar Japan |
Nathan
Shockey |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLIN 202 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Experimental Humanities This course
explores the literature, history, and media art of Japan since World War
2. Beginning with the lean years of the
American occupation of 1945 to 1952, we will trace through the high growth
period of the 1960s and 1970s, the “bubble era” of the 1980s, and up through to
the present moment. Along the way, we will examine radio drama, television,
popular magazines, manga/comics, film, fiction,
theater, folk and pop music, animation, advertising, and contemporary
multimedia art. Throughout, the focus will be on works of “low brow” and
“middle brow” culture that structure the experience of everyday life. Among
other topics, we will consider mass entertainment, the emperor system, the
student movement and its failure, the birth of environmental awareness,
changing dynamics of sex, gender, and family, “Americanization,” the mythos of
the middle class, and the historical roots of contemporary Japanese society. In
addition, we will think about changing images of Japan in American popular
media and the ways in which the mass culture of postwar Japan has shaped global
cultural currents in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Taught in English. Class
size: 20
|
91531 |
LIT 2101 Myth/Tale/Story |
Benjamin
La Farge |
. T . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
As the
anthropologist Malinowski has written, myths are "a special class of stories,
regarded as sacred...stories [that] live not as fictitious or even as true
narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more
relevant reality." It is the purpose of this course to demonstrate how
myths that once were sacred are secularized when recycled as literary art, and
how many of the greatest stories written by modem masters--from Melville to
Kafka--have tapped into the great myths of the past. But between those myths
and the modem short story lies the vast, unchartered
region of the tale--the oral tradition of story-telling. "The first true
storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales," wrote
Walter Benjamin, who argued that "the fairy tale taught mankind...to meet
the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits." We will
explore these mysterious waters by first reading The Metamorphoses of
Ovid, followed by The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and classic fairy tales by
Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm et aI., before tracing the residual presence of myth in the work
of modem masters, both male and female. Some of the papers assigned will give
students an opportunity to write their own tales if they wish. Class size: 18
|
91537 |
LIT 2140 Domesticity
and Power |
Donna
Grover |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Africana Studies, American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies Many American women
writers of the 19th and 20th centuries used the domestic
novel to make insightful critiques of American society and politics. These
women who wrote of the home and of marriage and detailed the chatter
of the drawing room were not merely recording the trivial events of what was
deemed to be their “place.” The course begins with Catherine E. Beecher and
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). We will also read the novels
and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fausett,
Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and others. Class
size: 18
|
91482 |
LIT / CHI 215 The Chinese
Novel: The Story of the Stone and
Gender in Late Imperial China |
Li-Hua Ying |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLINLC 120 |
ELIT/DIFF |
See
Chinese section for description.
|
91510 |
LIT 2153 Infernal Paradises: Literature of
Russian Modernism |
Olga
Voronina |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLINLC 206 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Russian & Eurasian Studies
Dominated by utopian thinking, the twentieth century witnessed both the
creation and deconstruction of many visionary projects, some of which combined
political endeavors to change the world with attempts to facilitate, subdue, or
subjugate artistic self-expression. In this course, we explore the theme of
utopia as an intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual concept with a great
capacity for social transformation. Focusing on works by Chekhov, Bely, Blok, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Zamyatin, Pasternak, Bunin, Nabokov, and Akhmatova, the course aims to demonstrate continuity of the
Russian literary tradition while revealing how innovative creative forms and
resonant new voices contributed to an unprecedented artistic revival, the one
that flourished under the harsh conditions of censorship, totalitarian
oppression, and forced isolation between the Russian culture and its western
counterpart. Class size: 20
|
91366 |
LIT 2163 Innuendo |
Nancy
Leonard |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
Studies in the not
quite said of fiction, poetry, drama and theory. Perspectives will be offered from
linguistics, poetics, etiquette, theater history and critical theory which go
some way to explain why we so often need not to articulate fully what most wants
saying. We’ll learn to distinguish the
contexts and purposes of different kinds of innuendo by the analysis of speech
acts, poetic statements, philosophical claims and social prohibitions. Close
reading and active discussion of literature will be at the center of the
course. Readings will be drawn from Ferdinand de Sassure
and other linguists, J. L Austin, Deborah Tannen,
Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Miss Manners, Proust, Chekhov, Wilde, Beckett, Agamben, Blanchot, and
Derrida. Critical and
creative writing assignments. Class size: 18
|
91535 |
LIT 2201 Imagining the Past: Medieval Crusading Literature and the Post-Medieval
World |
Marisa
Libbon |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 305 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed
Human Rights; Medieval Studies The Third Crusade is arguably the most famous
medieval attempt by western kingdoms to occupy the “Holy Land”: Jerusalem and
its environs. Lasting
from 1189 to 1192, and pitting the infamous crusader-king Richard I of England
(Richard the Lionheart) against the brilliant Muslim
leader and tactician Saladin, the Third Crusade has been a potent site of
literary, historical, and popular reimagining from the late twelfth century to
the present day. Why and how has
the memory of the Third Crusade been repeatedly reconstructed and mobilized?
And, to what end? What is the
relationship between history and literature, between (supposed) fact and
fiction when the past is reimagined? To address these questions, among others, our
field of exploration will include texts and images produced during several
periods: that of the Third Crusade itself; later medieval England as it looked
back at and grappled with the glories and disasters of its past; early Tudor
England, which reinscribed the late twelfth-century
past as a place where Robin Hood “reigned” in Richard I’s absence; and the
early twenty-first century, when, after 9/11, the Third Crusade re-entered the
modern discourse. This course counts
as pre-1800 offering. Class size:
18
|
91536 |
LIT 2202 Ecstasy, Hysteria, Obsession: Literature & the Extreme |
Francine
Prose |
. . . . F |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 201 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights
(World
Literature offering) Great literature
has often portrayed extreme emotions and their consequences—unrequited love and
erotic obsession, ecstatic joy and misery—as intense but nonetheless “normal”
aspects of human experience. But in the early 20th century, these
same states of consciousness began to be viewed as illnesses requiring
treatment, as aberrations with only a minimal relation to the political and
social realities that may have helped create them. The reading list will include long novels,
stories, plays, and works of nonfiction: Proust, Freud, Garcia Marquez, Bolano, Bronte, Mansfield, St. Aubyn,
among many others. There will be large amounts of reading and a weekly one-page
response paper. Class discussions will focus on language, on a close-reading of
short selections from the works we have read. Students should write to me at [email protected] explaining their reasons for wishing to take
the course. Class size: 20
|
91540 |
LIT 2212 Writing
Africa |
Nuruddin
Farah |
M . W . . |
11:50 -1:10 pm |
OLIN 307 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Africana Studies
(World
Literature offering) Over the
years, Africa has served as the background setting for a variety of British and
American authors, who perceive the continent as a place with “no intellectual
life” as V.S. Naipaul put it. Why is it, we’ll ask, that in these works, grand
ideas are raised and discussed with great intensity, when the African is
‘virtually absent,’ because the author denies him/her the power of speech, or
is physically present but not wholly as a full human being equal to the others?
We will, along the way, explore topics such as colonialism, racism, and
civilization, inquire into the construction of the African in the consciousness
of these authors, and ask what ‘contribution’ if any has the continent made
towards the ‘manufacture’ of these texts by Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce
Cary, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, V.S. Naipaul, William Boyd, Paul Theroux,
and Norman Rush. Class size: 18
|
91538 |
LIT 226 Intro to
Poetics: Texts, Forms, Experiments |
Joan
Retallack |
. T . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 309 |
PART |
Cross-listed:
Experimental Humanities This course is designed
for any students who wish to explore poetic forms, as well as those who are
considering (or on their way to) moderating into Written Arts. (Those already
moderated are also welcome if there is room.) We will be asking what poets need
to know in today’s world, not only about poetry per se, but also about the many
models and metaphors from other disciplines (philosophy, science, music, etc.)
that have always inflected the poetries of their times. We will explore a broad
range—historically and varietally—of ways to compose with words that have
and haven’t been called poetry. (Just what determines whether or not a piece of
writing is a poem?) We’ll also pay attention to technologies that are currently
expanding the genre, looking at various kinds of digital poetries. This is a
hybrid class: part seminar, part workshop. Students will produce a mid-term and
a final portfolio of work, as well as present work designed for
performance—both individually and collaboratively. There will be readings from
a required booklist and handouts throughout the semester. The class is required
to attend poetry readings (generally scheduled on Thursday evenings) and other
events related to the course during the semester. Interested students must
email Professor Retallack, mail to: [email protected]. Class
size: 18
|
91529 |
LIT 2319 The Art of
Translation |
Peter
Filkins |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 303 |
ELIT |
By
comparing multiple translations of literary, religious, and philosophical
texts, this course will examine the way in which translation shapes textual
meaning and our appreciation of it. We will also read several key theoretical
essays that trace differing approaches to translation and what can or cannot be
expected from translation. Finally, students will also take on a short
translation project of their own in order to explore firsthand what it means to
translate. Brief comparative readings will include multiple translations of
Homer, Sappho, Plato, the Bible, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka,
Babel, Rilke, Neruda, Borges, Basho, Li Po, and Celan.
Essays on translation will include those by Dryden, Schleiermacher, Humboldt,
Goethe, Benjamin, Valéry, Paz, and Nossack. Students should contact instructor to get
permission. Class size: 15
|
91365 |
LIT 2501 Shakespeare |
Nancy
Leonard |
M . W . . |
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 Shakespeare’s 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
Night’s 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: 20
|
91364 |
LIT 276B Chosen
Voices: Jewish Authors |
Elizabeth
Frank |
. . W . . . . . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm 1:30 -2:50 pm |
ASP 302 ASP 302 |
ELIT/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Jewish Studies, Theology
(World
Literature offering) In this
course we will read major nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish authors who,
in their attempts sometimes to preserve Jewish tradition and just as often to
break with it (or to do a little of both), managed to make a major contribution
to secular Jewish culture. The struggle to create an imaginative literature by
and about Jews is thus examined with respect to often conflicted literary
approaches to questions of Jewish identity and history (including persistent
anti-Semitism in the countries of the Diaspora and the catastrophe of the
Holocaust). In the process we will discuss such notions as Jewish identity and
stereotypes, questions of "apartness" and "insideness,"
and explore literary genres such as the novel, the tale, the fable, the
folktale and the joke in relation to traditional forms of Jewish storytelling,
interpretation and prophecy. We will look as well at what it is that makes
"Jewish humor" both Jewish and funny and consider the consequences of
a particular author's decision to write in either Hebrew or Yiddish, or in a
language such as Russian, German or English. We will discuss as well Jewish
participation in literary modernism. Authors include Rabbi Nachman
of Bratzslav, Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac
Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Primo Levi, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Aharon Appelfeld, Leslie Epstein,
and Angel Wagenstein." Class size: 20
|
91532 |
LIT 2800 Indian
Fiction |
Benjamin
La Farge |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
(World
Literature offering) In the days of British colonial rule, the collision
of East and West inspired a number of English authors to write some of their
best fiction, and since independence several Indian writers have re-imagined
that collision from a post-colonial perspective. The contradiction of writing
about Indian life in the language of the departed British Raj has created a
cultural hybridity which some of these novelists turn
to advantage. Indian fiction of the modern period is of three kinds; those
written by English authors during the last hundred years of Empire; those
written by Indian authors during the first sixty years of Independence; and
those written by Indians in the diaspora. From the
first we will read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
From the second we will read R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and Aravind
Adiga’s The
White Tiger, plus a selection of stories. From the third we will read V.S.
Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. To contextualize these novels, we will read
chapters from a brief study of Indian history, religion, and culture. Class size: 18