DIVISION OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

COURSE OFFERINGS FOR FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS

Literature I: A student planning to major in the Literature or Writing Programs must take one Literature I course, usually in the first year. Sophomores who have not yet taken Literature I have three sections which give them priority in registration, listed first below. Students exploring literature are welcome in the courses if places are available.

Other Courses: Any course at the 100 level and many courses at the 200 level are open to first-year students.

LIT I A Introduction to the Modern Novel

Professor: C. Smith

CRN: 91586 Distribution: A/B

Time: Tue Th 10:30 am ­ 11:50 am OLIN 303

This section of LIT I will introduce students to issues in the development of the twentieth-century English-language novel. The course might also be called "Modernism and After": we will read several standard modern examples of the genre by writers such as Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, paying attention to the formal and thematic disruptions and continuities between twentieth- and nineteenth-century fiction, and then we will examine some of the ways in which the novel has been refashioned by writers outside Europe, in the Commonwealth that encompassed the former British empire. Writers from the second half of the course will probably include Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Merle Hodge and Chinua Achebe. Students will write frequent short papers to practice critical writing and close-reading techniques.

LIT I B The Many Guises of Othello

Professor: W. Weaver

CRN: 91587 Distribution: B

Time: M 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm OLIN 304

The character of Othello and the context of his story from the original novella of Cinzio Giraldi, through the Shakespeare tragedy, the edulcorated Ducis version, the operas of Rossini and Verdi, and the Orson Welles film. Changes of taste and style, national differences are illustrated in the various versions of the drama of the Moor.

LIT I C 4 Poets: Donne Herbert Stevens Frost

Professor: C. Rodewald

CRN: 91588 Distribution: B

Time:M W 11:00 am ­ 12:30 pm PRE 127

Close readings of a few works by two seventeenth-century poets, sometimes thought of as sharing the category "metaphysical," and two twentieth-century ("modern") American poets. The focus will be on the characteristic qualities and excellences of each. Frequent short papers.

LIT I D Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

Professor: L. Morris

CRN: 91589 Distribution: B

Time: Th 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: German Studies

Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, a complex exploration of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has been called the greatest novel in the German language and is often compared to Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. This course will focus on this modernist masterpiece and examine the social, cultural, artistic, and political climate of Viennese culture at the turn of the century.

LIT I E The Russian Fantastic: Gogol, Bulgakov

Professor: L. Watton

CRN: 91590 Distribution: B

Time: M W 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Russian/Eurasian Studies

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) and Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) are two Russian masters of the fantastic and the absurd. This course is based on close readings of Gogol's Petersburg Tales ("The Portrait," "Nevsky Prospect," "The Nose," "The Overcoat" and "Diary of a Madman"), his novel Dead Souls, and Bulgakov's novellas Heart of a Dog, Diabolad, and his epic Master and Margarita. Among the issues to be addressed are the peculiar narrative logic of the Gogolian absurd, the phantasmagoric city of St. Petersburg, and the interrelationship of the demonic, divine and ethical in the satiric context. We will consider how these authors respond to prevailing sociopolitical conditions and trends (in Gogol's case the elaborately hierarchical Imperial Russian bureaucracy and institution of serfdom and in Bulgakov's case literature as an act of resistance to an increasingly totalitarian Soviet regime). Frequent papers and presentations. Enrollment limited to 15, with preference given the first- and second-year students and Russian Studies concentrators. In translation.

LIT I F The Quest for the Holy Grail

Professor: M. Lambert

CRN: 91591 Distribution: B

Time:M W 1:20 pm - 2:40 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

of related interest: German Studies

The grail before Monty Python. Careful reading of three medieval narratives of the holy grail (the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Vulgate Quest for the Holy Grail) and some study of the origins of the grail legend. Frequent short papers and in-class reports.

LIT 123 First Poetry Workshop

Professor: R. Kelly

CRN: 91592 Distribution: B/F

Time: F 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 309

This workshop is intended for new students who strongly desire to experiment with making their own writing a means of learning, both about literature and poetry, and about the discipline of making works of art. Stress is on growth: in the student's own work, and in the individuals's awareness of what sorts of activities, rhythms, and tellings are possible in poetry, and how poets go about learning from their own work. The central work of the course is the student's own writing, along with the articulation, both private and shared, of response to it. Readings will be undertaken in contemporary and traditional poets, according to the needs of the group, toward the development of familiarity with poetic form, poetic movement, and poetic energy. (Attendance at various evening poetry readings and lectures is required.) Admission by permission of the instructor; samples of work in verse or prose must be submitted in advance to the instructor.

LIT 151 The Modern Short Story

Professor: M. Simpson

CRN: 91905 Distribution: B

Time: F 10:30 am ­ 12:30 pm OLIN 309

This is a course for serious readers and writers of short fiction. Intensive reading will be required; a hundred pages a week at least. You'll read Joyce, Kafka, Babel, O'Connor, Mansfield, Porter, Hemingway, Singer, Salinger, Munro, Carver and a handful of others. A mid-term and a final exam will be given. Two papers will be expected, as well as oral reports and weekly classroom contributions.

LIT 201 Language as System: An Introduction to Linguistics

Professor: M. Lambert

CRN: 91593 Distribution: B

Time:M W 9:00 am ­ 10:00 am OLIN 202

This course will introduce the student to the analytic study of language, including the elements of linguistic analysis (phonology, morphology), research methods, historical linguistics, language families, the development of alphabets and writing systems, dialectology, synchronic (descriptive) linguistics, and the implications of linguistic theory on literal-critical approaches. The course will begin with a historical overview of linguistics as a discipline, taking care to contextualize it within a larger framework of intellectual and political movements.

LIT 202 A Lyric Modes

Professor: B. LaFarge

CRN: 91603 Distribution: B

Time: M W 11:00 am - 12:20 pm OLIN 309

The subject of this course is the short lyric poem--the poem as a palimpsest of rhythm, sound, and figurative language. Our models will be the verse paradigms that help to make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world: e.g., the ballad, the sonnet, blank verse, the ode, the song, the dramatic monologue, the villanelle, the sestina, etc. A particular concern will be the kinds of trope that distinguish classical (figurative) from modernist (elliptical) poetry.

LIT 215 Victorian Essays and Detectives

Professor: T. Dewsnap

CRN: 91597 Distribution: B/C

Time: Tue Th 10:30 am ­ 11:50 am OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

Serial reading, in weekly installments, of two or three popular detective novels, such as Wilkie Collins's Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle's Study in Scarlet, will provide social background for essays by Mill, Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, and others that intend to illuminate and alleviate the problems of a rapidly developing industrial state.

LIT 219 A Danube Literary Journey

Professor: N. Manea

CRN: 92210 Distribution: n/a

Time:M 3:30 pm ­ 5:30 pm OLIN 310

of related interest: German Studies

The course will start with Danube, by Claudio Magris, an account of a journey from the source of the river to its outlet in the Black Sea. The "literary cartography of Central and Eastern Europe will be studied through the work of such writers as Musil, Kafka, Canetti, Bruno Schulz, Ionesco, Krleza, Danilo Kis, Thomas Bernhard. An examination of these books for their literary values and as a reflection of the cultural landscape and the tumult of history, is the best introduction to the culture of Central Europe, its genius and its tragedy.

LIT 221 Writers' Workshop: Prose Fiction

Professor: P. Sourian

CRN: 91598 Distribution: B/F

Time:M 10:30 am ­ 12:30 pm OLIN 310

Practice in imaginative writing. Students will present their own work for group response, analysis, and evaluation. Also reading of selected writers. Permission of the instructor is required; samples of writing must be submitted before registration.

LIT 223 Cultural Reportage

Professor: P. Sourian

CRN: 91599 Distribution: B/F

Time: Tue 10:30 am ­ 12:30 pm ASP 302

For the self­motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. Stress on regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and TV. Work will often be submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings in Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, and by permission of the instructor, but not restricted to majors.

LIT 225 The Edwardian Novel

Professor: C. Rodewald

CRN: 91600 Distribution: B

Time: Tue Th 1:30 pm ­ 3:00 pm PRE 127

of related interest: Victorian Studies

Reading of some of the novels in the period between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Great War, including works by James, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Ford, Bennett, and Lawrence.

LIT 229 Modern Drama: Ibsen to Beckett

Professor: R. Rockman

CRN: 91601 Distribution: C

Time:M W 10:30 am ­ 11:50 am OLIN 310

A study of some principal playwrights who, by their original thinking about the uses of the theater and by the example of their playwriting, defined the directions, styles, and sensibility of much of modern (a.k.a. modernist) drama from c. 1880 to c. 1960. The playwrights: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O'Neill, Beckett. The reading in the course will usually comprise one full-length play per week along with reserve reading that may include a second play or some nondramatic writing. Some of the topics for our discussion: the idea of the modern, Naturalism and Expressionism, drama and the other arts, the world view of modern drama/theater. This course is intended to serve chiefly as an introduction to the rich, complex subject that is Modernism, and the counterpart to our study is to be found elsewhere in the college's course offerings.

LIT 242 Readings in Epic: Homer, Vergil, Milton

Professor: C. Rodewald

CRN: 91595 Distribution: B

Time:M Th 4:00 pm ­ 5:30 pm PRE 127

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

We will read four great poems (Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Paradise Lost) as great poems, attentive to the richness of their intrinsic poetic qualities as well as to their relations to each other.

LIT 250 English Literature I

Professor: N. Leonard

CRN: 91606 Distribution: B/C

Time:M Th 1:20 pm - 2:50 pm LC 206

An exploration of major writers, genres, and issues in the history of English literature from the medieval period through the mid-twentieth century, in a regularly offered sequence of three independent but related units. The authors and particular focus of each unit will be indicated in each semester's list of courses, but in fall of 1996 English 250 will include medieval and sixteenth-century poetry and drama, with some attention to prose; writers include, among others, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Sidney, More, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. In subsequent semesters English 251 includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by, for instance, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Wroth, Milton, Congreve, Fielding, Pope, and Swift. English 252 concentrates primarily on the novel and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some attention also to criticism and drama; among writers studied are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, Arnold, Joyce, Shaw, Lawrence and Woolf. The course is especially intended to encourage students to understand the production of literature as an intimately historical process, to read writers together as well as separately, and to begin reading with a greater awareness of genre, convention and form as well as culture or ideology. Any course in the sequence may be taken independently, but all students interested in English literature, especially those considering graduate studies, are encouraged to take two or more parts of the course.

LIT 259 Literature of the United States III

Professor: K. Swett

CRN: 92227 Distribution: B/C

Time: W 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm LC 210

In this course we will study works written between 1865 and 1930--from the post-civil war period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism, and emergent modernism. Authors include, but are not limited to, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, Willa Cather, H.D., Langston Hughes.

LIT 264 Comp Lit III: The 19thC Continental Novel

Professor: J. Rosenberg

CRN: 91602 Distribution: B/C

Time: W 10:30 am ­ 12:30 pm OLIN 303

of related interest: French Studies

An introduction to the most significant novels written by French, German, Russian, Scandinavian and Central European authors. Each work is examined as to its literary qualities, political or spiritual orientation, social and economic setting. Taken together the readings provide a comprehensive view of the artistic, aesthetic, scientific, philosophical and intellectual currents and developments in Europe between 1800-1900. The last novel we will be reading, The Manuscript in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, the work of a Polish author, written in French, taking place in Spain and having as main protagonists Christians, Moslems and Jews, illustrates the cultural breadth, intellectual fervor and depth of inquiry that marks the nineteenth century. Other novels considered are Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's Cousin Bette, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Hamsun's Hunger, T. Mann's The Buddenbrooks.

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LIT 266B Lit of Britain and Ireland, 1830­1947

Professor: D. d'Albertis

CRN: 91608 Distribution: B/C

Time: Th 1:20 pm ­ 3:40 pm OLIN 204

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies, Irish & Celtic Studies

Must be taken in conjunction with HIST 255B.

This course will serve, in conjunction with History/VS/ICS 255B, to introduce students to the history and literature of Great Britain from the first Reform Bill to the end of World War II. We will examine the influence of British imperialism upon cultural production in England, Scotland, and Ireland. With the Irish literary renaissance of the 1890, poets and dramatists fashioned a literary nationalism anticipated by nearly a century of artistic experimentation in merging the traditions of Gaelic- and Anglo-Ireland. The crisis of English national identity precipitated by two world wars will also be discussed with reference to modernism and post-war fiction. This semester's offering is preceded by a set of linked courses covering the literature and history of Great Britain and Ireland, 1660-1830. Strongly recommended for Victorian Studies majors. Students may take either or both parts of the sequence of jointly offered courses (divisible by semester, but not within a term).

LIT 271 Swift and Yeats

Professor: F. Grab

CRN: 91596 Distribution: A/B

Time: Tue Th 1:20 pm ­ 2:20 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies

"Imitate him if you dare,/ World-besotted traveller; he/ Served human liberty"--Yeats's tribute to Jonathan Swift testifies to the bond that he felt linked him to his great Anglo-Irish predecessor. This course will examine both their common concern for Irish liberty and the different paths each pursued toward the realization of his political, social and aesthetic goals. Through a reading of such works as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Drapier's Letters, and short prose pieces, together with a wide selection of Yeats's poems and prose, we will investigate the complex web of relationships prevailing between nationalism, colonialism, and literature.

LIT 274 The Medieval Lyric

Professor: K. Sullivan

CRN: 91594 Distribution: B/D

Time: Tue Th 2:50 pm ­ 4:10 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: French Studies, Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

This course will study the medieval lyric as it emerges in vernacular languages in the late eleventh century, flourishes during the high Middle Ages, and then gives way to Petrarchism and emerging Renaissance forms in subsequent years. We will be reading poems identified with political conflicts and crusades, poems composed by the goliards, or the wandering scholars of Europe, poems sung by women while weaving and poems written in praise of God, the Virgin Mary, and secular women. Because we will be examining works written originally in Latin, Provençal, Arabic, French, Italian, and German, as well as in English, students with some familiarity with one of these foreign languages are particularly encouraged to attend.

LIT 281 Slave Memories and the Memory of Slavery

Professor: M. Frank

CRN: 91604 Distribution: A/C

Time: Tue Th 1:20 pm ­ 2:40 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, MES

African-American literary traditions grew out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical slave narratives. In the tradition of "call and response," some contemporary African-American creative writers have returned to the "scene of the crime," producing a body of texts that might be called neo-slave narratives. Our reading throughout this course puts these two groups of texts together. Using, for example, works by Equiano, Brent, Douglass, and Keckley, we will take feminist and historical approaches to the contours of the original narratives, attempting to understand the ways in which their motifs and representational strategies speak to their immediate engagement with slavery and abolition. In turn, we will read the neo-slave narratives in an effort to understand why in a "post-civil-rights era" have writers such as Morrison, Johnson, Williams, and Butler written back to slavery in order to explore the ongoing meanings of race in America. Requirements: several short papers and group presentations.

LIT 285 "Masculinities"

Professor: C. Smith

CRN: 91605 Distribution: A/C

Time: W F 10:30 am ­ 11:50 am OLIN 307

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, MES

What is "masculinity"? More important, why is it and what is it for? Critical attention to the development in modern Europe and America of specific ways of being masculine may provide us with answers to these questions. Forming our reading list from a range of sources--literary, scientific, philosophical, autobiographical, filmic, theoretical and personal--we will attempt to understand the ways in which masculinity is produced in specific social contexts, in terms of class position, racial or ethnic identification, sexual orientation, immigration, biology, work, family, and so on. At the end of the semester we will turn to the recent "men's movement." Students will write frequent papers, undertake a group research-project, and will keep a journal on which class participation will draw. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

LIT 295 Film, Gender, and Culture

Professor: N. Leonard

CRN: 91898 Distribution: A

Time: W (lect) 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm PRE Films

Tu (Film) 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm PRE Films

See FILM 295 for course description.

LIT 304 The Long Poem

Professor: R. Kelly

CRN: 91611 Distribution: n/a

Time: Th 3:40 pm ­ 5:40 pm OLIN 310

The course is not concerned with epic poems (Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid) or with cosmic encyclopedic poets (Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, Milton) who take their scale from epic. Instead, we will be concerned with the long song--the possibility of wielding lyric powers over longer stretches of attention though much shorter than epic. Since poetry is like music in being an art of successiveness ("Nacheinanderkunst"), it works in time and as time, shaping the reader's time by words thought by rhythm out of silence. We will read poems and try to understand the connections between lyric structure, lyric devices, and the sensuous continuity of intellectual attention.

Some sense of prophecy (what will we read?) is comforting, so the following list is offered. The instructor cherishes some hope that the course itself may evolve in a manner like that of the texts it proposes to study, passing straight or crooked through the gates of the just-barely finite slalom that follows the first words spoken, when the poem begins its run.

Here are some of the poems we'll be looking at: Shelley, "Mont Blanc"; Lorca, "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"; Keats, "Eve of St. Agnes"; John Milton, "Comus" [A Masque]; Coleridge, "Christabel"; Hölderlin, "Patmos"; Duncan, "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar"; Whitman, "Out of the Cradle..."; Apollinaire, "Zone"; Rilke, from the Duino Elegies; Stein, "Lifting Belly"; Williams, "Asphodel"; Olson, "Maximus from Dogtown II." Some collateral texts may impinge on us: Spenser's Epithalamium; Theocritus, Idyll II; Pindar, several of the odes; Eliot, "The Waste Land"; Tennyson, from The Idylls of the King; St. John Perse, Éloges, and poems by Blake, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell.

LIT 308 Major American Poets

Professor: B. LaFarge

CRN: 92206 Distribution: B

Time: Tue Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 309

It may be said that American poetry found its own voice in the first half of the 19th century when Emerson challenged American "scholars" to free themselves from tradition. For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, acknowledged Emerson as a crucial inspiration. Emerson himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and Poe, were the first poets to achieve international recognition, but it was in the poems of Walt Whitman that a distinctively American voice was first heard--a voice that was both oracular and plain-spoken. At the same time, the oddly metered, introspective poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished during her lifetime, spoke in a New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American. Then, only thirty years after her death, the powerful modern voices T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Carlos Williams began to be heard. We will read selected poems by each of these, and we will also give equal time to the two major poets who stand somewhat apart but are no less impressive--Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers.

LIT 322 Poetry Workshop

Professor: J. Ashbery

CRN: 91613 Distribution: B/F

Time: F 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 310

Students present their own work to the group for analysis and response. Suggested readings in contemporary poets. Optional writing assignments are given for those poets who may find this useful. This course is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors but only by permission of the instructor. Samples of verse must be submitted before registration.

LIT 324 Advanced Fiction Workshop

Professor: M. Simpson

CRN: 91713 Distribution: F

Time: F 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 304

A workshop on the composition of short stories, for experienced writers. Students will be expected to read extensively and to devote significant time, daily, to the composition and revision of their own stories. Some time outside of class, for guest readings, may also be required.

LIT 329 The Irish Big House

Professor: T. Dewsnap

CRN: 91614 Distribution: B/C

Time:M 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies

Mainly twentieth­century fiction and plays. Liam O'Flaherty, Lennox Robinson, Molly Keane, Brendan Behan, and other English and Irish writers have exploited the ironic situation of the Anglo­Irish gentry living in prestigious manors on large estates and wielding great social power amid a majority population with alien codes and beliefs. By concentrating on the symbol of the Big House, we probably will be able to come to some understanding of the contrasting ceremonies of life inside and outside the manor. Some autobiographical and historical selections will document the problems--decadence, alienation, violence--of the Big House under siege.

LIT 331 Translation Workshop

Professor: W. Weaver

CRN: 91615 Distribution: B/D

Time: Tue 10:30 am ­ 12:30 pm OLIN 308

of related interest: French Studies

Though some knowledge of a foreign language is necessary, this is not a language course, and no particular proficiency is required. An interest in language, especially English, is the most important thing. Students will be expected to work on some translation project (preferably prose); but their work will serve chiefly as a basis for the discussion of general problems of translation, its cultural significance, and the relationship between translation and creative writing.

LIT 333 New Directions in Contemporary Fiction

Professor: B. Morrow

CRN: 91616 Distribution: B

Time: M 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 205

The diversity of formal narrative strategies employed by serious contemporary novelists and short story writers is only matched by the range of what is chronicled in their works. As we come to the end of the century, several works of fiction have emerged as high-water marks which begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. Not only is the novel not dead as a vital art form, but it appears to be in a period of dynamic development. One movement in particular--the New Gothic--seems especially to have flourished during the past two decades. This course will examine New Gothic and many other categories of current innovative writing. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Bernhard, Can Xue, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, Jeanette Winterson, John Hawkes, Angela Carter, and Richard Powers. Authors Joanna Scott and Paul West are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

LIT 355 Dante

Professor: K. Sullivan

CRN: 91609 Distribution: B/D

Time: F 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

This course will be devoted to a close reading of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the work which tells of Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and which constitutes, for the High Middle Ages, the literary equivalent of a cathedral or a scholastic summa. Because of the encyclopedic nature of this poem, students will be exposed, not only to the literary context, both Latin and vernacular, within which Dante situated his work, but also to the philosophy, theology, and history of the Middle Ages which play such important roles in the Comedy. We will consider, for example, not only Dante's relationship to classical literature, the troubadours and the dolce stil nuovo, but his relationship to university thought, to conflicts between the Church and the Empire, and to Florentine politics. The course is meant to provide both a firm appreciation of Dante as an individual author and of medieval culture, as seen through Dante's lens.

LIT 381 Contemporary Imaginations of American Women

Professor: M. Frank

CRN: 91617 Distribution: A/C

Time:W 1:20 - 3:20 OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, MES

Through consistent engagement with feminist theories which explore the complexities of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and race in American women's lives, we will examine a selection of texts by contemporary women creative writers and filmmakers which explore girlhood, maturation, sex, family, immigration and work, among other issues. These narratives help us to ask questions such as: How do questions of race, ethnicity, etc. shape women's experiences of gender? Do the politics of "difference" undermine the politics of "sisterhood?" Of whom do we speak when we say "American women?" What kinds of privileges do certain women enjoy? What are the possibilities of coalition politics? Writers might include: Alvarez, Hong Kingston, Allison, Paley, and Walker. Films might include: Go Fish, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., and I Like It Like That. By permission of instructor. Requirements: 3 papers.

LIT 385 Sensation/Melodrama/Horror

Professor: D. d'Albertis

CRN: 91618 Distribution: A/C

Time: F 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, Victorian Studies

This seminar investigates the nineteenth-century origins of popular cultural forms with palpable designs on their consumers. From the craze for sensation fiction in the 1860s to the lust for

slasher films in our own time, readers and audiences have been avid for representations of their own embodied responses to the sensational, melodramatic and horrifying. We will attempt to construct a genealogy of sensation in relation to melodrama and horror by considering debates about the harmful effects of popular culture on certain members of the general public (women, working-class spectators) in nineteenth-century Britain and then consider the ways in which these debates are still being rehearsed in discussions of contemporary cultural production. Readings in the fiction of Braddon, Collins, Wood, LeFanu, Wilde, Stoker, as well as theoretical works by Radway, Fiske, Walkowitz, Miller, Brooks, Gledhill, Modleski, Cvetkovitch and Clover among others.

LIT 395 Theory of Narrative

Professor: F. Grab

CRN: 91619 Distribution: A/B

Time: W 1:20 pm ­ 3:20 pm OLIN 310

"Narrative", writes Roland Barthes, "is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." This course will study a number of recent theorists (Barthes, Genette, Said, Ricoeur) who have attempted to understand the nature of this ubiquitous phenomenon. We will test their conclusions against a series of texts chosen primarily (but not exclusively) from the disciplines of literature, history, and psychology, all of which rely on narrative structure to represent--or to subvert--meaning. Thus we shall try to determine whether telling stories need always be the same as constructing fictions, or whether on the other hand "truth" can emerge intact from the rhetoric of its own (re)presentation.