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 2015.

 

91583

LIT  204A   

 Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:10 am -11:30 am

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies  It was over the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the concept of the author, as we now conceive of it, first emerged. When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? How does our assumption of who the author is affect how our reading of the text? We will be keeping these questions in mind as we examine the shift in medieval and Renaissance literature from epic to lyric and romance; from orally-based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, The Romance of the Rose, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, and Francois Villon's Testament.  Class size: 20

 

91755

LIT  204B   

 Comparative Literature II:

Baroque, Enlightenment, and the Age of Sensibility

Joseph Luzzi

. T . Th .

10:10 am -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.  Class size: 22

 

91759

LIT  250   

 English Literature I

Noor Desai

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

How did England, and English literature, 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 in order to fashion the beginnings of a self-consciously English literature. Other texts will include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,The Book of Margery Kempe, medieval religious and morality plays, More’s Utopia, Elizabethan sonnets, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.  Class size: 18

 

91761

LIT  252   

 English Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies    This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century—a 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 reading—of 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: 15

 

91762

LIT  257   

 American Literature I

Alexandre Benson

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies  This course will look at early and antebellum American writing (17th to mid-19th century) through questions of colonization and indigeneity; race, gender, and authorship; religion and the state; and aesthetic tradition and innovation. Our attention will focus primarily on the formal peculiarities through which individual texts develop their responses to these questions. These texts will include poems, novels, short stories, captivity narratives, and more by authors including Rowlandson, Edwards, Equiano, Wheatley, Jefferson, Schoolcraft, Irving, Brown, Apess, Hawthorne, Poe, and Douglass. Class size: 22

 

91763

LIT  259   

 American Literature III

Matthew Mutter

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

HEG 102

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies  This course tracks the development of American literature from the late nineteenth century to World War II.  We will explore new literary movements such as regionalism and naturalism; we will be particularly concerned with modernism in its various manifestations.  Along the way we will attend to a number of political and social developments (westward expansion, U.S. imperialism, WWI, Jim Crow, first-wave feminism, urbanization) as well as certain cultural and intellectual revolutions (the rise of the social sciences, the proliferation of mass media and the commodification of culture, secularization, Social Darwinism) that the literature of the time both absorbed and engaged. Writers likely to be covered include Twain, Crane, James, Cather, Larsen, Toomer, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Frost, Pound, and Eliot.  Class size: 20