JUNIOR SEMINARS The Junior Seminars in criticism are
intended especially for moderated Junior Literature majors. The seminars will
introduce students to current thinking in the field, emphasizing how particular
methods and ideas can be employed in linking literary texts to their contexts.
Intended too is a deep exploration of writing about literature at some length,
in the form of a 20-25 page paper, developed over the course of most of the
semester.
92147 |
LIT 314
Women's
Bodies / Women's Voices: Victorian to Modern |
Natalie Prizel |
M 10:10
am-12:30 pm |
OLIN
301 |
LA D+J |
ELIT DIFF |
Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Victorian Studies Explaining his
own poetic vetriloquizing of Sappho, Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne
wrote, “It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her.” This
course will interrogate what it meant to write in a woman’s voice, to write of
a woman’s body, and to work as an embodied female artist in the years between
approximately 1840 and 1930 in Britain. The course will include explorations of
women’s writing across genres, representations of and by women in the poetry,
fiction, and visual art of the period, and a rigorous interrogation and
destabilization of the category of “woman” and the “female body” as historical
and literary figures. Using methodologies drawn from feminist studies, queer
studies, and disability studies, this course will ask the fundamental question:
how or what does the word “woman” mean across the nineteenth- and early
twentieth centuries? How might the category be useful or not for evaluating the
aesthetic and ethical positions of texts, verbal and visual? And how are bodies
relevant in thinking through these questions? Texts might include works by:
Charlotte and Emily Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau,
Coventry Patmore, Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticist
painters, photographers, and poets, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith
Cooper), Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, William Butler Yeats,
and Radclyffe Hall. This course is a literature junior seminar. Class
size: 15
92136 |
LIT 3019
Nabokov’s
shorts: the art of Conclusive Writing |
Olga Voronina
|
T Th 10:10
am-11:30 am |
OLIN
308 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Russian This course will focus
on Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories as well as his memoir Conclusive Evidence
and the novel Pnin, both of which first appeared in story-length installments
in The New Yorker. We will read “Details
of a Sunset,” “Christmas,” “A Guide to Berlin,” “A Nursery Tale,” “The Visit to
the Museum,” “The Circle,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” “Ultima
Thule,” “Solus Rex,” “Signs and Symbols,” and “The Vane Sisters.” Keeping our
eyes open for the elusive, but meaningful, textual details and discussing the
writer’s narrative strategies, we will also trace the metaphysical streak that
runs through the entire Nabokov oeuvre. A discussion of all matters editorial
will be our priority. We will study Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine White
and William Maxwell, his editors at The New Yorker, and look at the drafts of
his stories, now part of the Berg Collection in the NYPL. Our endeavor to
understand the Nabokovian process of composition and revision will go
hand-in-hand with the work on our own writing.
This course is a literature junior seminar. Class size: 15
92173 |
LIT 3036
Poetic
Lineages |
Cole Heinowitz
|
W 1:30
pm-3:50 pm |
HEG
200 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Written
Arts T. S. Eliot famously
remarked, “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that
happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” Taking this
statement as our starting point, this seminar will explore the perpetual trans-historical
dialogue taking place within Anglo-American poetry and poetics. Tracing the
various poetic lineages from the Romantic era to the present moment, we will
explore the ways in which conceptions of the power of poetry are transformed by
shifting historical, aesthetic, political, and philosophical moments.
Throughout our investigations, we will ask: What is the relationship between
poetic utterance and political power? What role do subjectivity and emotion
play in poetic expression? How do the formal dimensions of language complicate
its denotative function? Writers to be considered include Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily
Dickinson, H.D., Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Clark Coolidge, and
J.H. Prynne. This course is a
literature junior seminar. Class size: 15