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 2013.)

91526

LIT 204B Comparative Literature II:

Baroque, Enlightenment, and the Age of Sensibility

Joseph Luzzi

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 301

ELIT

We will study the major theoretical and practical literary issues in the period 1600 to 1800. Our discussions will begin by examining the dialogue between poetry and the other arts of the Baroque, especially the music of Bach and the sculpture of Bernini. Then our focus will be on how principal literary debates (e.g., the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, the aesthetic attitudes of the New Science, the Encyclopedia project, and the emergence of modern feminism) shaped some of the profound historical and cultural changes of the age. As part of our sustained reflection on the role and reach and poetry, we will also examine the critique of Enlightenment rationality and rhetoric in the Age of Sensibility and Storm and Stress movements. A final goal will be to consider how the idea of "literature" itself underwent changes in the 17th and 18th centuries that reflected the complex attitudes toward modernity in this period of scientific, cultural, and political revolution. Authors will include Descartes, Vico, Voltaire, Mme de Graffigny, Rousseau, Goethe, and Wollstonecraft; as well as their recent critics Adorno, Culler, Eagleton, Habermas, and Said. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 20

91489

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III

Marina van Zuylen

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

Cross-listed: French Studies, German Studies Offered as the third installment of the Comparative Literature sequence, this course will explore some of the key issues in nineteenth and early twentieth century poetics. It will organize its readings around two opposing views: should literature carve for itself an autonomous place in the increasingly commercial world of publishing or should it be, as Balzac would have it, the scribbling secretary of the human condition, faithfully mirroring social and economic change? Readings from: Kant, Schlegel, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe, Gogol. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Woolf, Bergson and Proust. Class size: 20

91524

LIT 250 English Literature I

Marisa Libbon

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 306

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies How did England begin to take shape (and to shape itself) in the collective cultural imagination? The aim of our work in this course will be twofold: first, to gain experience reading, thinking, and writing about early English literature; and second, to devise over the course of the semester our own working narrative about the development of that literature and its role in the construction of the idea of England. We will read widely within the early literature of England, from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but we will also read closely, attending to language, choices of form and content, historical context, and the continuum of conventions and expectations that our texts enact, and sometimes pointedly break. Our texts will include Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, early descriptions and histories of England, and several “romances”—the pop fiction about knights and their adventures—that circulated widely in both Chaucer’s medieval and Shakespeare’s early-modern England. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 18

91525

LIT 252 English Literature III

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 310

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. Class size: 18

91363

LIT 257 American Literature I: Amazing Grace; The Puritan Legacy in American Literature and Culture

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

10:10 - 11:30 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross–listed: American Studies, Theology Writings from the first three generations of Puritan settlement in seventeenth-century Massachusetts are closely examined not only in relation to each other but also to later American texts bearing persistent traces of Puritan concerns. We will explore such essential Puritan obsessions as the authority of divinely authored Scripture, original sin, predestination, election, free grace, "the city on a hill," and covenanted relations between mankind and God. Our focus will be on the rich and fertile complexity, as well as the problematic features of Puritan belief and rhetoric as they find expression in Puritan writings. We will look at Pauline theology, Puritan plain style and metaphor, and the Puritan construction of the radically individual American self. Authors include notable Puritan divines, poets, historians and citizens, as well as later writers, among them Jonathan Edwards, Washington Irving, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Robert Lowell and Martin Luther King, Jr. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22

91527

LIT 258 American Literature II

Matthew Mutter

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross–listed: 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: 22