LIT I A Literature I: Eliot and James

Professor: D. d'Albertis

CRN: 92421

Distribution: B

Time: W F 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
Close reading and textual analysis of Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. Frequent papers will be assigned.

LIT I B Literature I: Anna Karenina

Professor: E. Frank

CRN: 92426

Distribution: B

Time: W 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies
Through a semester devoted to the "close reading" of the novel, students will be introduced to the study of fiction. Discussion will include the concepts of genre, convention, and style, "the rhetoric of fiction" and problems of narration. The topic of "realism" in Western literature will go hand in hand with specific questions about the novel's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian, French and English fiction and will address such questions as the conflict between morality and empathy, and differences between novels of psychological analysis and novels of social criticism.

LIT I C Literature I: Donne Marvell Keats and Yeats

Professor: C. Rodewald

CRN: 92428

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 11:00 am - 12:30 pm PRE 127

Close readings of three English 17th century ("metaphysical") poets and an American "modern," attentive to their distinctive qualities. Short papers on each poet.

LIT I D Literature I: Virginia Woolf

Professor: N. Leonard

CRN: 92427

Distribution: A/B

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

A close study of three Virginia Woolf novels: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves. If time permits, we will also read Orlando. The course will emphasize techniques of close reading and literary analysis, while introducing students to a range of critical, biographical, and theoretical work on Woolf. Frequent papers will be assigned.

LIT I E Literature I: James Joyce

Professor: C. Smith

CRN: 92429

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 306

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies
An introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, with some attention to Finnegans Wake. Our concerns will include questions of modernism and the modern novel, epic, pastiche, "low" and "high" art, genre, exile, the avant-garde, alienation, and changing notions of what constitutes "literature." Background reading will cover different critical approaches to Joyce's work. We will use frequent short papers to develop skills in various aspects of literary study and critical writing. In addition to the papers there will be a semester-long research project. Students should read Dubliners before the start of classes; familiarity with this text will be assumed from the beginning.

LIT I F Literature I: William Faulkner

Professor: D. Ford

CRN: 92619

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 308

William Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His often troubling, yet always provocative treatment of race and gender lend insight into southern culture and history. Through close textual analysis we will confront these issues in his major works including Light in August.

LIT 123 First Poetry Workshop

Professor: R. Kelly

CRN: 92430

Distribution: B/F

Time: F 1:30 pm - 3:30 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 individual'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 from the past year must be submitted to the instructor via campus mail by noon on Friday, August 29.

LIT 151 The Modern Short Story

Professor: M. Simpson

CRN: 92923

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 will 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 202 Lyric Modes

Professor: B. LaFarge

CRN: 92637

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 204A Comparative Literature I: Introduction to Medieval Lit

Professor: K. Sullivan

CRN: 92435

Distribution: B/D

Time: Tu Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
This is the first course in a three-semester sequence on Comparative Literature which aims to expose students to the development of European, primarily continental literature, in a historical framework. The first semester of this sequence will address the literature of the Middle Ages, the second semester that of the early modern era, and the third semester that of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries; each of these courses may be taken independently of the others. We will start the semester by examining the shift from texts such as The Song of Roland, with its account of Charlemagne's invasion of Muslim Spain, to texts such as the Proven�al love lyric, with its emphasis upon courtly refinement, and the relation shift in feudal structures to which this literary development might correspond. We will then look at the relationship between the songs of the wandering scholars, Dante's Vita Nuova, and the growth of scholasticism. Later on we will turn to the Fabliaux or the obscene comic poetry of the Middle Ages, and to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which bring together courtly, scholastic, and burlesque traditions we will have already encountered. We will end the course by reading two 15th-century authors, Christine de Pizan, often considered to be the first feminist of Western letters, and Fran�ois Villon, the poet-thief of late medieval France. In addition to reading these works, we will address the relationship between the medieval literary text and music which often accompanied its recitation and illuminations which often decorated its manuscripts.

LIT 2100 History and the Novel

Professor: D. d'Albertis

CRN: 92422

Distribution: B/C

Time: Tu Th 1:20 pm - 2:40 pm OLIN 201

The novel (or what D.H. Lawrence once called the "bright book of life") has long aspired to document reality in its most comprehensive form. One way of organizing the real has been to approach it through the study of history. The historical novel represents a unique fusion of fictional narrative with the historiographic impulse, producing a remarkably flexible and mutable form to which writers with very different aims have been drawn. This course will serve as an introduction to the relationship between history and the novel across cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our principal texts will be Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Swift's Waterland, and Morrison's Beloved. We will also discuss such influential theorists of historical narrative as Georg Lukacs and Hayden White, as time permits.

LIT 2101 Myth/Tale/Story

Professor: B. LaFarge

CRN: 92431

Distribution: B/F

Time: Tu Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 301

As the anthropologist Malinowski has written, myths are "a special class of stories, regarded as sacred . . . [that] live not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality." It will be the purpose of this course to demonstrate that many of the greatest stories written by modern masters--from Poe, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Conrad, and Chekhov, to Kipling, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner--have tapped into the great myths of the past. But between those myths and the modern short story lies the vast region of the tale--the oral tradition of story-telling. "The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales," wrote Walter Benjamin, who argued that "the fairy tale taught mankind . . . to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits." We will explore this region by reading The Metamorphoses of Ovid, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and a selection of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and others, before tracing their residual presence in the work of modern writers, both male and female. This course is designed especially, though not exclusively, to serve the needs of fiction writers and poets.

LIT 2102 The Harlem Renaissance

Professor: M. Frank

CRN: 92433

Distribution: B

Time: W F 10:30 am - 11:50 am LC 208

Cross-listed: AADS, American Studies, Gender Studies, MES
This course will be a concentrated examination of the "re-birth" of African-American artistic expression that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. While this course will focus primarily on the literary production--poetry, drama, and prose fiction--we will also pay attention to the nonfictional essays that often responded to and influenced the literature, as well as to the music and visual arts of the time. Importantly, part of the semester-long concern of this course will be an attempt to place such artistic expression in its multiple contexts--social (including contemporary notions of gender and race), economic, geographical, etc.--by drawing upon the work of scholars like David Levering Lewis, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria Hull, among others. Likely primary authors will include Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jesse Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer.

LIT 2103 Don Giovanni

Professor: W. Wilson

CRN: 92434

Distribution: A/B

Time: M 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Philosophy of the Arts
Mozart's Don Giovanni provides the opportunity to examine antecedents and constituents of a work of art, and its consequences. Earlier manifestations of the "Don Juan" complex in Spain and Italy are to be studied along with the factors determining the collaboration of Mozart and the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, to produce the opera, which then provoked multiple responses, including those of Pushkin, Byron, Kierkegaard, and Shaw. The issues are social as well as aesthetic and philosophic. The course is to be conducted as a seminar, requiring the active participation of all its members. An additional period will be scheduled to satisfy the convenience of those involved in order to allow for listening and watching recordings of Don Giovanni and other works.

LIT 2104 Joseph Conrad

Professor: F. Grab

CRN: 92471

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:30 am LC 208

An examination of selected short fiction and several novels, including Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Lord Jim. "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God," writes Georg Lukacs; but Conrad's fiction confronts a post-Nietzschean world that must endure not just God's disappearance, but His death. We will study the resultant problems as they affect questions of consciousness, temporality, and narration. Frequent papers.

LIT 2105 Poetry Workshop for Artists

Professor: R. Kelly

CRN: 92638

Distribution: B/F

Time: Th 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm OLIN 309

The workshop will give an opportunity to painters, scultpors, photographers, film makers and video artists to explore some of the energies of writing. Strategies of approach and form will be considered, along with questions of meaning and intention, and the over-riding issue of the relationship among the arts. If time and interest permit, we'll look at some of the remarkable artists who have worked in both visual and verbal arts, like Michelangelo and Blake, or Hartley, Arp, Ernst and Tanning in our time. The workshop is open to sophomore, junior and senior art majors. No portfolio need be submitted - just consult with instructor at Registration.

LIT 2121 Orlando Furioso

Professor: S. Sartarelli

CRN: 92460

Distribution: B/D

Time: Th 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 303

Cross-listed: Italian Studies
The great epic romance of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is at once a culmination of the medieval chivalric tradition and a fanciful reformulation of the Classical epic. A popular favorite among the European courts of its time, it influenced such important later works as Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queen and Cervantes's Don Quixote. While we shall certainly examine the Orlando Furioso as a repository of Carolingian, Arthurian, and derived conventions, as a playful attempt as "modern" epic, and as the single literary work that perhaps best captures the spirit and verve of the Italian Renaissance, we shall read it above all for the pleasures afforded by its magical, intricately woven plots. The course is open to all students interested in Renaissance literature and will be taught in English. Italian studies students will be expected to read substantial portions of the work in the Italian; the instructor will also regularly give textual analyses of passages in the original, to highlight Ariosto's unparalleled mastery of the ottava rima stanza, long the standard of Italian narrative verse, and to illuminate his use and subversion of medieval and Classical subject matter. For the English version of the Orlando, the class will use Barbara Reynold's splendid verse translation, a classic in its own right. Permission of the instructor required.

LIT 221 Writers Workshop: Prose Fiction

Professor: P. Sourian

CRN: 92436

Distribution: B/F

Time: M 10:30 am - 12:30 pm ASP 302

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: 92437

Distribution: B/F

Time: Tu 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 310

For the self-motivated 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 2301 Studies in Comedy

Professor: R. Rockman

CRN: 92432

Distribution: B

Time: M W 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 202

of related interest: French Studies
Stage comedy from ancient times to this century. Examination of kinds of comedy (for example, farce, satiric comedy, romantic comedy, comedy of manners, "black" comedy, tragicomedy) and of the strategies and mechanisms of comedy. A study, then, of technique and style as well as of genre. Some of the dramatists: Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Jonson, Moli�re, Congreve, Wilde, Shaw, Ionesco, Churchill. Others TBA. Readings in theory and criticism. Regularly scheduled papers. Lower-college students have priority in the course.

LIT 2401 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Professor: M. Lambert

CRN: 92438

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 101

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
The unities and contrasts, pleasure, and meanings of this rich collection. Study of Chaucer's language and some background readings (e.g. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), but primarily an examination of a great poem. No previous knowledge of Middle English required.

LIT 252 English Literature III

Professor: C. Smith

CRN: 92439

Distribution: B/C

Time: F 10:30 am - 12:30 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
This course is the third part of a three-semester sequence which studies major writers, genres and issues in the history of English literature from the medieval to the modern period. Lit 252 takes up poetry, fiction, drama and criticism of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the poetry and prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Arnold's essays, the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Yeats, the drama of Wilde and Shaw, Woolf's essays, Eliot's The Waste Land, short stories of Lawrence and Joyce, and Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. The course aims to encourage students to understand the production of literature as an intimately historical process, 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; all students interested in English literature, especially those considering graduate studies, are encouraged to take one or more parts of the course.

LIT 258 Literature of the U.S. II

Professor: M. Frank

CRN: 92440

Distribution: B

Time: Tu 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: American Studies, MES
This course will study a variety of authors who wrote during the period that has come to be known as the American Renaissance. We will read works by both canonical and noncanonical writers of the period in relation to each other. Such a juxtaposition will allow us to place the literary figures, their works, and the period as a whole within a cultural-social milieu. This approach may help us to understand the centrality of the American Renaissance in the development of American literary studies. Writers are likely to include Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Wilson, and Herman Melville.

LIT 264 The 19th Century Continental Novel

Professor: J. Rosenberg

CRN: 92469

Distribution: B/C

Time: W 10:30 am - 12:30 pm LC 206

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies
of related interest: French Studies
The aim of this course is to acquaint students with representative examples of novels by distinguished French, Russian, German and Central European authors. Their works are analyzed for style, themes, ideological commitment, and social and political setting. Taken together they should provide an accurate account of the major artistic, philosophical and intellectual trends and developments on the Continent during the 19th century. Readings include Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Balzac's Cousine Bette, Hamsun's Hunger, T. Mann's Buddenbrooks.

LIT 268 Seven Victorian Myths

Professor: T. Dewsnap

CRN: 92470

Distribution: B/C

Time: Tu Th 1:20 pm - 2:40 pm OLIN 301

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
Patterns of confrontation and self-discovery associated with the knight, the gypsy, the vampire-lady, the ingenue, the patriarch, the madman, the child abroad. Readings include much of the poetry of Browning and Arnold, and three novels (e.g. Borrow, The Romany Rye; Disraeli, Sybil; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray). Some attention to Victorian artists, especially the Pre-Raphaelites.

LIT 2790 Emily Dickinson and Her America

Professor: N. Leonard

CRN: 92941

Distribution: B

Time: Th 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, Victorian Studies
This intensive study of Dickinson's poetry challenges the usual reading of the poet as fearful recluse from the world. Taking as its center the roughly 1700 poems of Emily Dickinson, the seminar will explore the widening circles which extend Dickinson's many connections with the educational, social and political worlds of Amherst, Massachusetts, together with the larger New England contexts of philosophical argument, religious revival, material culture, and women's writing. Finally, her poems need to be understood in the widest circle enclosing the nation as a whole, the Civil War itself with its continual proliferation of deaths. Biography, letters, criticism, and historical scholarship will extend our awareness of Dickinson's poetry. The seminar will go on a field trip to the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst to see the places from which she forged her powerful poetic voice.

LIT 289A English Grammar: Descriptive and Prescriptive

Professor: E. Frank

CRN: 92472

Distribution: B

Time: Th 8:30 am - 10:20 am OLIN 202

A comprehensive introduction to the principles of old-fashioned, rigorous English grammar, the way it was taught to our grandparents. Each two-hour class will be divided thus: one hour learning rules and analysis (diagramming included), with examples, exercises, and quizzes; the second hour to be spent as free time devoted to language play, including (among other topics) idioms, correct usage, and investigations into English and American prose style, both past and present. Although the course may be taken for remedial purposes, students should have a genuine interest in the topic for its own sake and be able to undertake drill and drudgery with a cheerful heart. Poets, pedants, writers, and prospective teachers especially welcome.

LIT 290 History of the English Language

Professor: M. Lambert

CRN: 92473

Distribution: B

Time: M W 10:30 am - 11:30 am OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
An introduction both to the facts about the evolution of our language during the last thousand years or so and to the ways in which linguistic changes can be discovered, described, explained, assessed, and grouped.

LIT 301B Nabokov

Professor: C. Rodewald

CRN: 92474

Distribution: B

Time: Tu Th 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm PRE 127

We'll read a handful of the early Russian novels and a handful of the later American novels, focussing on their continuity of thematic and stylistic concerns.

LIT 3101 The Doom of the Tory Satirists

Professor: W. Wilson

CRN: 92477

Distribution: B

Time: M 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 301

Seminar study of the literary judgment pronounced on social, economic, and intellectual aspects of the culture emergent in the early years of the eighteenth century in England, as manifest primarily in satirical works by members of "The Scriblerus Club," Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, prominent among them, but satirical works by some others and some theory of satire will be considered as well.

LIT 3102 African Short Stories

Professor: C. Achebe

CRN: 92620

Distribution: B

Time: W 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 101

of related interest: French Studies
The course will introduce students to the African literary experience from a wide selection of short fiction written in the last fifty years by major practitioners of the genre. Works from North, West, Central, East and Southern Africa will be studied in the light of the diverse colonial experiences of the continent. If they were written originally in French, Arabic or Portuguese, they will be studied in their English translations. Writers to be encountered will include Tayeb Salih (Sudan); Bessie Head (Botswana); Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe); Luis Bernado Honwana (Mozambique); among many others, either in individual-author collections or general anthologies.

LIT 322 Poetry Workshop

Professor: A. Lauterbach

CRN: 92479

Distribution: B/F

Time: F 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 307

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. This course is open to freshmen provided they, like the other classes, submit manuscripts.

LIT 324 Advanced Fiction Workshop

Professor: M. Simpson

CRN: 92480

Distribution: F

Time: F 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 310

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 327 Irish Poetry

Professor: T. Dewsnap

CRN: 92481

Distribution: B/C

Time: M 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies
Yeats asked Irish poets to "Sing the peasantry...the holiness of monks...porter-drinkers' randy laughter...the lords and ladies gay..." He didn't always take his own advice. Irish poets are perhaps burdened more than most by the claims of formal tradition, history, politics, and religion, and by questions of what public role to adopt. The central issue of the course is the concept of the Irish poet's identity, which will require some exploration of mythical, historical, and technical traditions. We will read some Gaelic poets in translation, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and ballad makers in English, twentieth-century Revivalists, Antirevivalists, political poets, unpolitical poets, tight-lipped northerners, less tight-lipped southerners. Our goal is to appreciate the uniqueness of specific voices and specific poems. Since memorization of verse is, from ancient times, a part of the training of Irish poets, students will be required to memorize some poems for recitation and also to share the fruits of independent research by leading the discussion of chosen authors.

LIT 328 Dada and Surrealism

Professor: J. Rosenberg

CRN: 92482

Distribution: A/C

Time: M 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: French Studies
of related interest: Art History
Conceived shortly before World War I as a rebellion against established concepts of art and literature, Dada assumed a political orientation in Germany until the demise of the Weimar Republic. In France its thrust was of a more abstract nature, eventually crystallizing into Surrealism which became a powerful intellectual force until 1939. This course explores the respective attitudes of these movements toward art and literature, politics and experiments and their possible impact upon contemporary artists and writers. It examines the interaction of the ideological and poetic through a close analysis of the manifestos, periodicals, pamphlets, poetry, prose, drawings, prints, films of such individuals as Tzara, Duchamp, Breton, Dali, Ernst, Masson, Picabia, Man Ray, Aragon, Elouard, Bunuel, Desnos, P�ret, Pr�vert, Char and Queneau. Students with an adequate knowledge of French are encouraged to read the texts in the original language for extra tutorial credits in French.

LIT 331 Translation Workshop

Professor: W. Weaver

CRN: 92483

Distribution: B/D

Time: M 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm OLIN 310

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. The only grades given will be Pass and Fail. Limited to 12 students.

LIT 335 Joan of Arc & Medieval Heresy

Professor: K. Sullivan

CRN: 92484

Distribution: B/D

Time: F 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm LC 120

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies, French Studies
This course will focus on the trial of Joan of Arc in Rouen in 1431, the trial at which Joan was condemned for heresy and burnt at the stake. We will begin the semester by examining writings on heresy, composed prior to this trial, by Church Fathers, inquisitors and heretics, writings which defined the heretic, not only as someone who holds heretical views, but as a particular type of person. We will then devote the bulk of the semester to a close reading of the trail transcripts, focusing each week upon a particular aspect of this text such as Joan's depiction of the voices which ordered her to save her country, the judges' concern about Joan's preference for masculine clothes, and medieval attitudes toward suicide and rape. Finally, we will consider a series of texts which shed light upon the trial, including the panegyric which Christine de Pizan, considered France's first feminist, composed about Joan during Joan's lifetime; the trial of Gilles de Rais, Joan's companion-at-arms whose notorious crimes inspired the legend of Bluebeard; the scholastic redefinition of the witch at the end of the fifteenth century which brought about the witch persecutions of the early modern era; and Shakespeare's Henry VI, with it strange and ambivalent depiction of the woman who played such an important role in the loss of France from the English crown.

LIT 336 Contemporary African American Women's Narratives and Black feminist Theory

Professor: M. Frank

CRN: 92485

Distribution: A/C

Time: Th 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 303

Core Course: MES
Cross-listed: AADS, Gender Studies
Coming out of the crossroads of the 1960s Civil Rights/Black Power movements and the second wave of American feminism, contemporary African American women's writing has demanded our (re)consideration of power relations in the United States. These writers' persistent voices have energized a growing body of critical and theoretical inquiry that engages questions of subjectivity, community, hegemony, and resistance along divisions and intersections of gender, class, and race. Working consistently with this emergent discourse of black feminist criticism, we will analyze imaginative texts by Paule Marshall, Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Naylor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison, among others. Students will be expected to lead class discussions and write one or two shorter papers and a longer final essay.