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 2014.

91402

LIT 204A

Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

OLIN 101

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies When Virgil's hero Aeneas deserts his beloved Dido in order to fulfill his destiny to found Rome, he establishes the oppositions around which many of the major works of medieval and Renaissance literature would orient themselves. Is civic duty to be preferred to individual love, as Virgil is usually read as suggesting? Is the straight path of epic to be chosen over the wandering itinerary of romance? Are the transcendent truths of Empire and Church to be pursued over the immediate experiences of private life? Medieval literature, with its idealization of courtly ladies and knights errant, is often seen as taking the side of Dido, while Renaissance literature, with its self-conscious return to antique ideals, is usually said to champion Aeneas. With this framework in mind, we will read St. Augustine's Confessions, troubadour lyrics, Dante's Inferno, the Arthurian romance Lancelot of the Lake, Petrarch's Canzoniere, and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. Class size: 20

91535

LIT 204B

Comparative Literature II

Marina van Zuylen

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -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, Molière, Madame de la Fayette, Goldoni, Sor Inés de la Cruz, Descartes, Rousseau, Schiller, and Goethe. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22

91534

LIT 250

English Literature I

Marisa Libbon

M . W . .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

OLIN 301

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. Other texts will include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 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. Class size: 18

91533

LIT 251

English Literature II

Terence Dewsnap

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

This course will present literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seventeenth-century writers articulated the conflicts of the times, puritans against witches and tobacco, aristocrats against puritans, democracy against monarchy, scientific empiricism against traditions of magical thinking. Some flung themselves wholeheartedly into the fray, others sought serene escape. Against this background, our main interest in the first half of the semester is love poetry and religious poetry including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Vaughan and Milton. The second half of the semester focuses on traditions of satire and the beginnings of the novel of ideas: Defoe, Pope, Swift, Johnson and others. Class size: 18

91539

LIT 257

American Literature I: AMAZING GRACE; THE PURITAN LEGACY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

10:10 am- 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. Class size: 22

91609

LIT 258

American Literature II

Alexandre Benson

. T . Th .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies In this course, we will read major works of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Our historical touchstone will be the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, an event whose influence can be felt across the literary field -- not only in slave narratives but also in sentimentalist fiction and transcendentalist philosophy -- at a crucial moment in what is often called the "American Renaissance." More broadly, the figure of the fugitive will give us a way of approaching the themes of transience, transgression, and retreat that preoccupy many of the authors we will cover: Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Class size: 18