92266

LIT 2032 signs and symbols: pattern recognition in literature and code

Collin Jennings

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLINLC 115

ELIT

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities In digital media, algorithms govern the relationships between words and documents (e.g., in search results, advertisements, and binary code). Linguistic and numerical values are intertwined. Yet the affiliation between literary and computational interpretation has a longer history that this course charts from the emergence of novelistic and mathematical probability in the late 18th century, to the disciplinary formation of literary criticism and computer science in the early 20th century, to the proliferation of digital media today. Readings from these historical episodes will guide our approach to learning the fundamentals of digital text analysis, which will provide a practical context in which to investigate new connections between literary and computational patterns. Texts to be read include David Hume’s Essays , Fanny Burney’s Evelina , Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise , I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism , and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl .  Class size: 18

91756

LIT 2050 Blues, Spirituals & the 20^th Century African American Novel

Donna Grover

. T . Th .

11:50 am -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: 22

91551

LIT 2081 Mass Culture of Postwar Japan

Nathan Shockey

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 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: 22

91751

LIT 2105 POETIC JUSTICE: Law & LitERATURE from Plato to THE Present

Joseph Luzzi

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights “Roman law was a severe form of poetry,” the Italian philosopher Vico claimed, attesting to an ancient relation between law and literature. This course will explore the fascinating, often contentious dialogue between literary texts and the representations of justice and legal systems in works ranging from Plato’s Apology, Dante’s Inferno, and Thomas More’s Utopia to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Our goal will be to show how literature “thinks through” issues of justice in ways that often anticipate, subvert, and critique existing legal codes and practices. Questions to explore include: What is the relation between “evidence” in literature and in law? How do literature and law depend on related modes of interpretation and close reading? Most important, what does the literary imagination teach us about the way societies choose to construct the legal systems and ideas of justice that make the social contract operable and legitimate? By the end of the course, students will understand why the poet Shelley once claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Class size: 22

91999

LIT 2134 TRADITIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Peter L’Official

. T . Th .

10:10 am -11:30 am

OLIN 305

ELIT

This course will introduce students to the African American literary tradition. We will explore a range of African American literary practices alongside the development of related cultural, aesthetic, and vernacular forms and movements while remaining mindful of broad historical shifts in American life from the 18^th century to the present. In tracing these emergent and lasting voices, modes, and styles, we will examine how authors have created, defined, and complicated the traditions of literature within which they participate. Readings will include novels, essays, autobiography, poetry, and drama; writers will likely include Douglass, Jacobs, Du Bois, Toomer, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin, Lorde, Reed, Morrison, and Whitehead. Class size: 18

91757

LIT 2140 Domesticity and Power

Donna Grover

. T . Th .

10:10 am -11:30 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies Many American women writers of the 19^th and 20^th 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: 22

91758

LIT 218 Free Speech

Thomas Keenan

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 201

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights (core course) An introduction to debates about freedom of expression. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? Why? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do in particular with literature. and the arts. What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? Debates about censorship, hate speech, the First Amendment and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be obvious starting points, but we will also explore some less obvious questions: about faith and the secular, confession and torture, surveillance, the emergence of political agency. In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will look at 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, with a heavy dose of case studies (many of them happening right now) and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory. Class size: 22

91981

LIT 2194 Berlin: Capital of the 20th CENTURY

Thomas Wild Screenings:

. T . Th . . . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm 6:30 pm -9:00 pm

OLINLC 118 LC 118/PRE 110

ELIT

Cross-listed: German Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies Throughout Germany's turbulent twentieth-century history, Berlin has been not only the capital of five different German states but also the continuous capital of German culture. In this course, we shall explore the interconnections between politics, art, and social life through manifold literary texts (e.g. Döblin, Nabokov, Baudelaire, Poe), major theoretical writings (e.g. Benjamin, de Certeau, Augé, Young), as well as through films (e.g. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Triumph of Will, Run Lola Run), architecture (Hitler's and Speer's plans for "Germania"), memorials (Holocaust memorial, Jewish Museum), and other visual art works (e.g. by Kollwitz, Grosz, street art). Our scrutiny of the significant changes in Berlin over the past century will focus on two historical thresholds: Around 1930, when the totalitarian regimes in Europe emerged, and around 1989, when this "age of the extremes" seems to come to an end, and our contemporary period with its compelling developments begins. Berlin can thus be called, in adaptation of Walter Benjamin's expression about Paris' significance for the 19th century, the capital of the 20th century. - Taught in English. Class size: 22

91998

LIT 2213 BUILDING STORIES

Peter L’Official

. . W . f

11:50 am -1:10 pm

RKC 115

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies Cities and their surrounds have long been fertile grounds for the construction of narrative. This course examines relationships between narratives and their settings by employing conceptual frameworks borrowed from architectural studies and histories of the built environment. Weekly discussions of a wide range of texts—literary and otherwise—will be structured around building typologies and common tropes of urban planning: the row-house brownstone, the apartment building, the skyscraper, the suburban or rural house, and the arteries of linkage between them. We will read each set of texts as narratives of place, space, and architecture to discover what, if any, architectures of narrative may undergird or influence them. We will consider to what extent geography and landscape shape culture and identity; we’ll chart relationships between race, class, gender, and the environment as articulated by the city and related regions; and we will explore notions of public and private space and our ever-mutable understandings of what it means to be “urban.” Texts will include novels, essays, films, visual art, and graphic novels; authors may include Nicholson Baker, Paul Beatty, Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Ben Lerner, Paule Marshall, D.J. Waldie, Colson Whitehead. Class size: 22

91750

LIT 2263 Culture & the Rise of the English Novel

Lianne Habinek

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed: Science, Technology & Society How do “nature” (ingrained, inborn, biological and genetic constraints) and “nurture” (upbringing, circumstances, and environment) interact to create society, personality, and ideas – in short, to create culture? Answering this question became crucial for thinkers in 17th- and 18th-century England. The unfurling British Empire’s travels necessitated a deep bout of national introspection; concurrently, the new literary form of the novel began its ascent, seeking to create and to capture an English culture. We will investigate the earliest iterations of the nature/nurture debate, examining how it played out across the interwoven fabrics of science, philosophy, and literature in this period. In addition, we will listen for their echoes in modern approaches to culture, e.g., Freud, Dawkins, and Pinker. The course begins with Shakespeare’s Winter's Tale and its curious “alteration” by David Garrick; we turn then to problems of race and gender raised in the early novella Oroonoko by Aphra Behn (who may have been a spy). Thereafter, we will read Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, essays by Locke and Rousseau, epistolary novels by Fanny Burney and Tobias Smollett, and works by Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. Class size: 18

91536

RUS/LIT 231 St. Petersburg: City, Monument, Text

Olga Voronina

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 201

FLLC

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Literature; Russian & Eurasian 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 Russia’s 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 Russia’s 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. Taught in English. Class size: 22

91792

LIT 233 THE Easter Rising IN Ireland, aPRIL 1916

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies The hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rebellion, a significant event in the creation of an Irish Free State, will be celebrated in a few months. Looking back, we will study the lives and writings of the militants, several of whom were poets and teachers, and the ideological currents that shaped their different resolves. Questions persist about the motivation and goals of the leaders, Pearse, Plunkett, MacDonagh, Connolly. The political effects of its periodic commemorations is often an issue. We will read contradictory accounts of the rising and explore the content and emotional tone of numerous songs and speeches which served to excite the ardor of the participants and their public-- and the scorn of naysayers. Class size: 15

91584

LIT 234 Literature of the Crusades

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Medieval Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Religion In November of 1095, on a field outside Clermont, France, Pope Urban II, long frustrated by the internecine warfare between Christian barons, urged an assembled council, “Let them turn their weapons dripping with the blood of their brothers against the enemy of the Christian faith .... Let them hasten, if they love their souls, under their captain Christ to the rescue of Sion.” A great shout of “God wills it” arose from the crowd around him. For much of the following two centuries, Christians departed in large battalions to attempt to gain possession of the Holy Lands, now under Muslim control, and, for many centuries thereafter, they dreamed of reviving such a quest. In this course, we will be studying the considerable literature produced around the Crusades, which includes epics, lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons, in an attempt to understand the mentality that inspired lords and peasants, knights and monks, men and women, and adults and children to take up the cross. While we will be considering primarily the Catholic perspective, attention will also be paid to the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish points of view on these conflicts. What happens when religion goes to war, when eschatology meets history, and when the celestial Jerusalem becomes identified with the earthly Jerusalem? Insofar as, for much of the Middle East, the Crusades continue to provide a principal model of the encounter between West and East, what exactly is implied by this paradigm? Class size: 22

92373

LIT 2404 Fantastic JourneyS AND THE Modern World

Jonathan Brent

. . . . F

3:00 pm – 5:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies; Russian & Eurasian Studies 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 crumble—barriers 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 modernity—where 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 civilization—in art, morality, politics, the psyche and social life—a 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: 22

91764

LIT 2485 James Joyce's Fiction

Terence Dewsnap

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtlic Studies Joyce was an autobiographical writer who wrote about one place, Dublin. And he was an experimental writer and a prominent Modernist in tune with the literary and artistic innovations of the early twentieth century. We will read his short stories in Dubliners and his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as his modern epic Ulysses. Class size: 15

91749

LIT 2501 Shakespeare

Noor Desai

M . W . .

10:10 am -11:30 am

OLIN 202

ELIT

Before Shakespeare was ever an icon, an industry, or required reading in high schools throughout the world, he was merely one of dozens of poets and playwrights working in London around the turn of the seventeenth century. This course attempts to recover an unfiltered view of Shakespeare’s works by performing close readings grounded in an attention to their historical conditions. We will learn how Shakespeare’s writings are embedded in theatrical and literary traditions, and how they fit into a context undergoing tremendous social, political, artistic, and intellectual upheaval. Through careful investigations of Shakespeare’s techniques, we will also discover how his writings engage philosophical and social issues relating to politics, sexuality, gender, and race that remain pressing today. While our primary aim will be to cultivate our close-reading skills, we will also draw on philosophical texts, theater history, film and performance work. In addition to the sonnets, we will read representative plays that span Shakespeare’s career, including Richard III, Twelfth Night, 1 Henry IV, Macbeth, As You Like It, Othello, and The Tempest. Open to all students. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22

91753

LIT 2882 DiffeREnt Voices, DiffeREnt ViewS

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Global and Int’l Studies Significant short works by some of the most distinguished contemporary writers of Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East are examined for their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray the socio-political conditions, spiritual belief systems, and attitudes toward women in their respective countries. Through discussions and short analytical papers, we seek to determine the extent to which these writers rely on indigenous literary traditions, and have been affected by Western artistic models and developments by competing religions and ideologies. Authors inclue Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Mahmoud Darwish, Mahasveta Devi and Tayeb Salih. Class size: 18