LITERATURE

A student who majors in the Literature Program begins by choosing a Literature I course from a range of such courses offered each semester. To moderate in Literature a student must have taken at least six courses in the Division including any language and creative writing courses. At least one course must be in the English, United States, or comparative literature sequence. After Moderation, students choose seminars at the 300 level, and often tutorials in special topics as well. Students are encouraged to study a language other than English, and study-abroad programs are easily combined with a literature major. Any course at the 100 level and many courses at the 200 level are open to first-year students.

CRN

 10016

Distribution

 A/B

Course No.

 LIT I B

Title

Literature I: Virginia Woolf

Professor

 Nancy Leonard

Schedule

 Mon Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 107
A close study of three Virginia Woolf novels: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, and, if time permits, Orlando. An emphasis on techniques of close reading and literary analysis, and an introduction to a range of critical, biographical, and theoretical work on Woolf. Frequent papers.

CRN

 10158

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT I E

Title

Literature I: Kinds of Drama

Professor

 Robert Rockman

Schedule

 Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 308

Related interest: Theater

Of the classical categorization of literature, epic, lyric, dramatic, this course undertakes a study of the third. Kinds of drama to be read and discussed: tragedy, comedy, and some of their historically recognized subdivisions such as tragicomedy, domestic tragedy, comedy of manners, farce, drama of ideas, drama of the absurd. Plays ancient, early modern, neoclassical, nineteenth and twentieth century. We study play form, style, characterization, theme. We make comparisons and contrasts; e.g. between ancient Greek, Shakespearean, modern tragedy. Supplementary reading in ideas about drama and theatre. In class, students must be prepared to read aloud from the plays.

CRN

 10410

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT I F / FSEM II

Title

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Professor

 Donna Ford

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 306
"So you're the little lady who started the war," Abraham Lincoln allegedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Despite its controversy and often poor reviews (even Charles Dickens attacked it for being overly sentimental) in the 19th century it sold more copies than the Bible and has never gone out of print. In our close reading of this text we will examine Stowe's use of sentimentality and romance within her highly politicized text. We will discuss and analyze how the archetypes of race and gender that Stowe created managed to become fixtures within American culture. In our discussion of the text we cannot ignore the broad scope of literary criticism that this novel has generated from the mid-nineteenth century until now.

CRN

 10385

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT I G / FSEM II

Title

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

Professor

 Deirdre d'Albertis

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 308
Landscape figures in Hardy's writing not only as a backdrop to human desire, error, and loss, but as a powerful, if mute force of destiny in its own right. Critic Raymond Williams writes, 'The Hardy country is of course Wessex: that is to say mainly Dorset and its neighbouring counties. But the real Hardy country, I feel more and more, is that border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change." We will explore the geography of this imaginary district known as "Wessex", in relation to regionalism in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as to the complex cultural mapping described by Williams. This seminar is dedicated to close study of a few novels set in Hardy country: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). Frequent papers will be assigned.

CRN

 10429    

Course No.

 LIT I H / FSEM II MVZ

Title

Baudelaire

Professor

 Marina van Zuylen

Schedule

 Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118
Charles Baudelaire is the poet of Modernity. The Parisian Prowler (Le Spleen de Paris), his collection of prose poems published in 1869, constitutes one of the most dramatic turning points in France's literary history. Heavily indebted to Edgar Allen Poe's art theories, Baudelaire's collection of short vignettes about urban despair, document what Sartre saw as the beginning of Existentialism in France. Baudelaire rejected the idea that literature must thematize heroic gestures and inspire timeless ideals. Rather, his portraits of contemporary life are sketches of melancholy and transgression; among the fallen heroes are garbage collectors turned city-archivists, prostitutes communing with the Ideal, and smokers who convert their cigarettes into symbols of art for art's sake. All of these anti-heroes have discovered a paradoxical wisdom of failure. To do nothing, to vegetate, or to engage in gratuitous acts of good and evil is the lot of the Parisian Prowler. To Baudelaire, this existential boredom is the lot of Modern city-dwellers; having lost their ideals, their aimless wanderings become a way of life. As Baudelaire questions the relationship between art and its public (comparing the artist to prostitute), he inaugurates the Modernist notion that unless it is prepared to shock the reader into a new vision of the world, Art is not worth producing. Many of the poems will be read in conjunction with Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, a collection of art and music criticism. There will be additional readings by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

CRN

 10306    

Course No.

 LIT I J / FSEM II WW

Title

Othello

Professor

 William Weaver

Schedule

 Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 310
The course will involve a close reading of the Shakespeare tragedy as well as the Italian novella that was its source. Then students will be introduced to various adaptations and variations, from the neoclassical version of Ducis to the film of Orson Welles. The Rossini and Verdi operas will be seen and discussed. The problems of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on will also be examined, as Shakespeare's work is reinterpreted over the centuries.

CRN

 10326    

Course No.

 LIT I K / FSEM II JR

Title

Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum

Professor

 Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

 Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 306
A close examination of the most significant work by this year's Nobel-Prize winner in Literature, who more than any other contemporary novelist, has probed as deeply, relentlessly and with such artistry, the development of Germany from Nazism through cold-was division to unification.

CRN

 10019

Distribution

 F

Course No.

 LIT 121

Title

First-year Fiction Workshop

Professor

 Robert Kelly

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 101
This course is for students new to the college who propose a commitment to writing and have already written stories or worked toward narrative text of any length. It is designed to develop skills as well as to encourage new ways of telling, teaching how to transform language into experience, how to compose paragraphs using both narrative logic and musical measure, how to edit one's work, and how to read manuscripts of others with sympathy and critical alertness. Some reading and analysis of rhetorical strategies of several contemporary writers. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Kelly by 12:00 noon on Wednesday, December 1st.

CRN

 10311

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 LIT 204B

Title

Comparative Literature II: Renaissance and Reformation

Professor

 Karen Sullivan

Schedule

 Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302
In this course, we will study the literature of the Renaissance and the Reformation in continental Europe. We will focus upon the relationship between historical developments, such as the discovery of the New World, Protestantism, and the Wars of Religion, and the literary tests - poetic, dramatic, or novelistic - written during these years. To what extent did the new ways of reading charted by humanists contribute to reform movements? How did different thinkers react to the violence spawned by the competing religions? In what manner did the court of Versailles affect the plays being produced at this time? These are some of the questions we will be addressing over the course of the semester. Authors to be read include Petrarch, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Erasmus, Luther, Marguerite de Navarre, Descartes, Pascal, Racine, Moliere, and Juana Ines de la Cruz.

CRN

 10159

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 207

Title

Major English Romantic Poets

Professor

 Vivian Heller

Schedule

 TBA
Close readings of key works by the "First Generation" romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the "Second Generation" poets, Keats and Shelley. It time permits we'll try to work our what romanticism means in the case of Byron. The focus will be on individual poems and the "characteristic excellences and defects" of each of the poets.

CRN

 10020

Distribution

 A/B

Course No.

 LIT 2121

Title

Animadversions on Eros

Professor

 William Wilson

Schedule

 Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 pm OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Classical Studies, Italian Studies

A study of important texts that have responded to the force of eros and continue to shape thinking about the relation between the physical and the spiritual. Plato, The Symposium, Lucian, The Golden Ass, Petronius, The Satiricon, the Pervigilium Veneris, Dante, The Vita Nuova, Ficino, Plato's "Symposium," Bembo, the Asolini, and for a modern perspective, Stendhal, On Love, and Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

CRN

 10021

Distribution

 B/C

Course No.

 LIT 2124

Title

Victorian Fantasy and Nonsense

Professor

 Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

 Mon Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am Olin 202
This course will study Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and other Victorian writers of nonsense and fantasy. For the most part, we will be reading a variety of non-realistic poems and stories written for children (and sometimes adults) including fairy tales, gothic mysteries and comic inventions.

CRN

 10022

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2125

Title

Three Novels of Thomas Mann

Professor

 Frederic Grab

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 309
A study of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus - three novels whose encyclopedic range encompasses much of the history, philosophy and art of the twentieth century. We will examine the way in which Germany's greatest novelist gave literary form to the dominant cultural and political issues of his age: from the life of a family in a small German city at the turn of the century to the rise and fall of the Third Reich, as witnessed by a demonic musician who found himself reliving the eternal quest of Doctor Faust.

CRN

 10071

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2126

Title

Modernism in a Classical Vein

Professor

 Andre Aciman

Schedule

 Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 118
This course aims to give students an understanding of the Modernist novel as a genre whose history is far more steeped in the Classical tradition than is otherwise believed. For all their innovation, authors like Svevo, Musil, and Proust were able to convey their uniquely disaffected view of human beings in a language that is unusually lucid and staid for an age that prides itself on its ability to explode literary forms. This course is designed for all students of literature as well as for creative writers who wish to see how great authors of the twentieth century have taken the Classical tale and pushed it to the limit. Readings include: Musil, Three Women, Radiguet, Count d'Orgel's Ball, Proust, Swann in Love, Svevo, The Conscience of Zeno, Ford, The Good Soldier, Yourcenar, The First Night, Durrell, Justine, Joyce, Dubliners, Mann, Death in Venice, and "Tonio Kroger", Olivia, Olivia.

CRN

 10023

Distribution

 A/B

Course No.

 LIT 2130

Title

Writing about Art

Professor

 Elizabeth Frank

Schedule

 Wed 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm OLIN 205

Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 205

Cross-list: Integrated Arts

We will examine the emergence of art criticism in its pre-theoretical and pre-professional forms, dividing the course into segments dealing with some of the strongest critical voices of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Authors will almost certainly include most of the following: Winckelmann and Goethe; Diderot, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Fromentin, and Apollinaire; Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Fry, Stokes and Berger; Greenberg, Rosenberg and other American and European critics. Lecture and discussion will focus on the ekphrastic tradition, formalist modes of analysis, and cultural criticism, and there will be occasional "workshop" sessions for criticizing student work. Students will write about art as well as art critics, and will gather their papers into three editions of an arts journal they will edit and publish themselves. There will be trips to New York City to visit museums and galleries. Enrollment: 13-15.

Prerequisites: One course in European or American art or architecture. Will consider those with strong background in studio practice and film.

CRN

 10417

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2131

Title

Saint Petersburg: The Birthplace of Russian Literature

Professor

 Tatiana Boborykina

Schedule

 Mon Wed 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 204
Sometimes St. Petersburg is called "the birthplace of Russian Literature." As soon as the city was founded (by Peter the Great in 1703), the depiction of city's impact on people's inner world became the subject of Russian Literature. The course will explore the dark corners of streets and of minds. It will try to investigate the mysteries, the beauty and the ugliness of human nature in the context of the mysterious, beautiful and ugly nature of the city itself. It will focus on the writings of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky, and their most 'Petersburgian' stories. It will explore Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman" and his short story "The Queen of Spades"; a number of Gogol short stories, including 'The Overcoat', 'Nevsky Prospekt', and 'The Nose'; and Dostoyevsky's stories 'The White Nights' and 'The Double', and his novel Crime and Punishment. Some films will also be shown.

CRN

 10025

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 221

Title

Writers Workshop:Prose Fiction

Professor

 Peter Sourian

Schedule

 Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 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. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Sourian by 12:00 noon on Wednesday, December 1st.

CRN

 10352

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2302

Title

Puerto Rican Literature in the United States

Professor

 Michelle Wilkinson

Schedule

 Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: LAIS, Gender Studies, MES, American Studies

In this course students will examine the history of Puerto Rican writings in the U.S. from the 1920's to the present. Beginning with the essays of Arturo Schomburg through the memoirs of Piri Thomas to the poetry of Judith Ortiz Cofer, we will explore the diversity of Puerto Rican voices and visions. While focusing on texts written in English, we will consider a few texts in translation from Spanish that chronicle experiences of migration and return. We will discuss the issues of color, class and gender in the literature as well as how issues of language shape the production and reception of the texts. Possible authors include Pedro Pietri, Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales, Miguel Pinero, Willie Perdomo, and Giannina Braschi.

CRN

 10026

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 254

Title

Middle English Literature

Professor

 Mark Lambert

Schedule

 Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 303

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

An introduction to the culture and vernacular literature of Medieval England and Scotland. We shall read in the major narrative poets of this period (Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl-poet, Gower, Barbour, Henryson) consider traditions of lyric poetry, study some of the mystery plays and, if members of the group are interested, prose writings of the English mystics. No previous knowledge of Medieval English is required, but students should have a lively interest in language, since they will be expected not simply to learn to understand and pronounce the older tongue, but to keep thinking of English as a medium for artistic expression.

CRN

 10027

Distribution

 B/C

Course No.

 LIT 257

Title

Literature of the U.S. I

Professor

 Elizabeth Frank

Schedule

 Wed 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 201

Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 203

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies

Writings from the first three generations of Puritan settlement in seventeenth-century Massachusetts are closely examined not only in relation to each other but also to later American texts bearing persistent traces of Puritan concerns. We will explore such essential Puritan obsessions as the authority of divinely authored Scripture, original sin, predestination, election, free grace, "the city on a hill," and covenanted relations between mankind and God. Our focus will be the contradictory and problematic features of Puritan culture as they find expression in Puritan literature, with its predilection for the plain style, figurative language, the rhetoric of religious emotion, and the construction of the radically individual self. Authors include notable Puritan divines, poets, historians and citizens, as well as later writers, among them Jonathan Edwards, Washington Irving, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Robert Lowell.

CRN

 10028

Distribution

 B/C

Course No.

 LIT 264

Title

19th-Century Continental Novel

Professor

 Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

 Wed Fri 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 204

Related interest: French, German, Russian and Eurasian 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.

CRN

 10029

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 277

Title

Homosexualities & Modernism

Professor

 Lindsay Watton

Schedule

 Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Gender Studies

Beginning in the late nineteenth century "the love that dare not speak its name" became more and more audible with a plurality and diversity unanticipated by Lord Alfred Douglas's singularly (in)famous phrase. The purpose of this course is to trace representations of same-sex relationships in European (especially English and Russian) and American (expatriate and Harlem Renaissance) modernists from the 1890's to the 1930's. We will consider such topics as Aestheticism, Decadence, scientific and pseudo-scientific theories of sexual 'deviation' and difference, innovations in artistic language and structure, and the trials, both literal and figurative, to which several of our authors and texts were subjected. Gender, race and class, as they inform our understanding of what J. Dollimore has called "sexual dissidence", will be ongoing concerns. Authors and works to be read include: O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis, Teleny (Anonymous), A. Gide, The Immoralist and Corydon, L. Zinovieva-Annibal, "Thirty-Three Freaks," E. Nagrodskaya, The Wrath of Dionysus, R. Hall, The Well of Loneliness, D. Barnes, Nightwood, N. Larsen, Passing and selected poetry of Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes. A film series will accompany the course.

CRN

 10413

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2801

Title

The Nobel Slavs

Professor

 Marina Kostalevsky

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

The reader's response to the literature of the twentieth century was affected, for better or worse, by critical reviews, bestseller lists, and numerous literary prizes, among which the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious. In this course we will examine the works of the Nobel Prize laureates from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Readings include works by Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladislaw Reymount, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Jaroslav Seifert, and Ivo Andric. Significant attention will be paid to the political and social impact of the Nobel Prize, particularly in the cases of Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn. Subject matter also includes viewing and discussion of films based on the works of some of the writers. Classes will be conducted in English.

CRN

 10430

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2810

Title

Hawthorne, James, Hurston, Morrison

Professor

 Thomas Keenan

Schedule

 Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 204
Close readings of selected texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. We will examine in particular the question of the relation between allegory and history, between the rhetorical complications of exemplary stories and the at once fleeting and weighty sense of the past that haunts these American writers. And what about the future? What are the ethical demands of historical memory, and what literary forms do they take? What work is required, literary or political or ethical, to assume the identity "American"? We will read carefully a small number of major works by Hawthorne, James, Hurston, and Morrison, from short fictions to major novels (The Scarlet Letter, The American, Mules and Men, Sula) to critical writings (James on Hawthorne, Hawthorne's reviews, Hurston's journalism, Morrison's essays), with assistance when needed from work in contemporary literary theory.

CRN

 10031

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 290

Title

The History of the English Language

Professor

 Mark Lambert

Schedule

 Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 210

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.

CRN

 10411

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2901

Title

Race, Gender, and Modernism

Professor

 Donna Ford

Schedule

 Tu Th 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 203
The push in American Modernism to "make it new" meant a break with the past, with convention. For many writers, this break was facilitated by the use of an "Other." For instance, critic Michael North argues that in the work of Gertrude Stein and Picasso, "the step away from conventional verisimilitude into abstraction is accomplished by a figurative change of race." With Stein this meant the use of the African-American voice and with Picasso his African masks. In this course we will examine how this looking at oneself through a mask impacts modernist narratives and how the mask subverts conventional definitions of race and gender. We will read Stein's Three Lives, William Faulkner's Light in August, Richard Wright's Savage Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Swanee and Chester Himes Yesterday Will Make You Cry. We will also read Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Freud's Totem and Taboo and some literary theory and criticism.

CRN

 10032

Distribution

 B/C

Course No.

 LIT 3001 Upper College Seminar

Title

Y2K: Shakespeare around the Globe

Professor

 Nancy Leonard, et alia

Schedule

 Mon 7:00 pm - 9:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross list: MES, AADS

The millennial Shakespeare is a writer read, produced, filmed and adapted everywhere, in different nations and within different historical and contemporary imperatives. Though the Globe for which he wrote has been brilliantly rebuilt in London, Shakespeare is no longer just English. Germany, France, Italy, the countries of Africa, Russia, Japan, the U.S.: all have richly specific traditions of performing, translating, interpreting and adapting Shakespeare. The seminar will study five or six plays in depth, including Hamlet, Othello and The Tempest, and will refract them through different national and cultural perspectives such as 18th- and 20th-century editions and translations of Shakespeare in Germany, the romantic Shakespeare of 19th-century France, the North African adaptations of Othello and The Tempest, the Italian operas of Rossini and Verdi on Othello. Segments of the course will be taught by Professors van Zuylen, Watton, Kempf, Weaver, other members of the faculty, and contemporary scholars from outside the college. The seminar is limited to 15 students with Upper-College standing and several previous courses in literature. Students will be expected to master the plays quickly and to be flexible in entertaining disparate and challenging points of view about their meaning and value.

CRN

 10033

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 308

Title

Major American Poets

Professor

 Benjamin LaFarge

Schedule

 Mon Th 11:30 am - 12:50 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.

CRN

 10419

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3102 Upper College Seminar

Title

African Short Stories

Professor

 Chinua Achebe

Schedule

 Wed 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm OLIN 101

Related interest: AADS, 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.

CRN

 10034

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3104

Title

Modern Tragedy

Professor

 Benjamin LaFarge

Schedule

 TBA
All tragedies see the human condition as doomed; but in classical Greek tragedy the protagonist's fate, usually signified by an oracle or omen, is externalized as something beyond human control, whereas in modern tragedy, starting with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw in the protagonist's character. Since then the modern protagonist has increasingly been seen as a helpless victim of circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is sometimes externalized as history, war, or society, sometimes internalized, but in either case the protagonist has been reduced in stature, so that 20th-century tragedy can only be called ironic--a far cry from the heroic tragedy of ancient Greece. In tracing this complex history, including the disappearance and revival of the chorus, we will examine tragedies by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Buchner, Dostoyevsky (his novel Crime and Punishment), Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller, all of which will be scrutinized in the light of major theories by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others.

CRN

 10136

Distribution

 A/C

Course No.

 LIT 3111 Upper College Seminar

Title

Victorian Theatricality

Professor

 Deirdre d'Albertis and William Driver

Schedule

 Wed 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 101

Cross listed: Integrated Arts, Victorian Studies, Gender Studies

The Victorians, preoccupied as they were with the importance of being earnest, were consummate actors, performing an array of now fairly unfamiliar roles inflected by constructions of race, gender, social class, and empire. As Nina Auerbach has noted, the "private theatricals" of this period were every bit as flamboyant and artful as the public ones enacted on stage. In this seminar we will examine both the theatricality of every-day life and representations of every-day (and not so every-day) life in the theater of nineteenth-century Britain, paying special attention to the social history of performance. We will read novels of the period exploring the ambiguous and often treacherous ground between art and life, appearance and reality, including Austen's Mansfield Park, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Du Maurier's Trilby, and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. So too, we will study the influence of theatricality on the self-presentation of public people ranging from Charles Dickens to Ellen Terry. Our particular focus in this course will be Victorian melodrama and its characteristic moral discourse on sexuality and class as rendered through stylized gesture and tableaux; we will also consider related modes of theatrical "realization." A two-credit tutorial dedicated to the performance of a Victorian melodrama will be offered in conjunction with the seminar. Prerequisites: At least one course in nineteenth-century literature, history, culture or theater history. Upper- College standing assumed. Enrollment limited to 15. Students are encouraged to discuss the course with instructor prior to registration.

CRN

 10312

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 LIT 3112 Upper College Seminar

Title

St. Augustine and the Fourth Century

Professor

 Karen Sullivan

Schedule

 Fri 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm LC 120

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will study the works of the celebrated Father of the Catholic Church, Saint Augustine, within the context of the century in which he lived, and we will attempt to resolve some of the paradoxes that dominate his life and works. How did Augustine reconcile his background in classical learning with his faith in the Christian religion? His study of philosophy and rhetoric with his espousal of a creed deeply suspicious of these fields? His onetime attraction to heresy with his later position as bishop of Hippo? How did he make sense of the concurrent Christianization of the Roman Empire and destruction of that Empire under barbarian forces? While we will concentrate on Augustine's own writings, including The City of God, The Confessions, and numerous minor works, we will also read the writings of several of his contemporaries in order to complete our understanding of his world. A tutorial will be offered for those wishing to read these works in the original Latin.

CRN

 10431

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3201 Upper College Seminar

Title

The Literature of Witness

Professor

 Thomas Keenan

Schedule

 Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm LC 118
The seminar examines the literature of the involuntary "I" - the one who does not choose but is rather chosen to speak. Witnesses speak because they must, because what they see or hear demands to be told, to others. What is it to survive, in order to bear witness - or to bear witness, in order to survive? And who speaks when "I" am caught - caught by surprise, caught on tape, caught up in something, caught in a bind? Does this demand for narrative in the first person mark the limit of responsibility, or the point where it becomes possible? The demand to testify is not simply a literary theme but the very name of its most difficult task, one which becomes even more complex in an age of real-time transmission. The seminar will consider a range of literary and theoretical work about trauma and disaster, the challenge of the Holocaust, the right to remain silent, eyewitness video, and what it means to give a gift, among others.

CRN

 10036

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3212

Title

Self-Conscious Colloquialism

Professor

 William Wilson

Schedule

 Tu 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm LC 120

Cross-listed: American Studies

A study of the emergence of a distinctive American prose style and loose form, from the origins in the self-conscious vernacular of backwoods narration through the works of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

CRN

 10037

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 322 B

Title

Poetry Workshop

Professor

 John Ashbery

Schedule

 Fri 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm OLIN 203
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. Samples of verse must be submitted before registration. This course is open to freshmen provided they, like the other classes, submit manuscripts.

Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Ashbery by 12:00 noon on Wed. December 1st.

CRN

 10038

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 3223 Upper College Seminar

Title

Workshop in Cultural Reportage

Professor

 Peter Sourian

Schedule

 Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 205
For the self-motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism, the course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from 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, but not restricted to majors.

CRN

 10298

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 3224 Upper College Seminar

Title

Investigative Poetics: Projects, Experiments and Procedures

Professor

 Joan Retallack

Schedule

 Th 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 305
"The world is complex; the human will is simple-minded.

This is why we must artfully calculate our chances."

Genre Tallique, Glances: An Unwritten Book

Students in this course will have the opportunity to work on extended projects. Operating with a variety of compositional strategies, we will explore the abundance that can enter a poem in a spirit of purposeful play. This approach is designed to respond poetically to the complexity of life in today's world. It entails an acute level of noticing words and their consequences while pursuing questions we deem of utmost importance. You will complete five projects for your final portfolio. I will provide examples of investigative methods from a variety of fields as well as from the work of an international range of contemporary poets but the richness of the mix will depend on students bringing language from a gamut of work/play practices into the class. There will be several required books supplemented by photocopied materials. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Prerequisites: upper class standing, previous poetry workshops.

CRN

 10348

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 324

Title

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Professor

 Alice Dark

Schedule

 Fri 1:00 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 202
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. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Dark c/o Prof. Sourian by 12:00 noon on Wednesday, December 1st.

CRN

 10040

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 329

Title

The Irish Big House

Professor

 Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

 Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies

This course focuses on twentieth-century 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 Anglo-Irish 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, and violence--of the Big House under siege.

CRN

 10305

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 338

Title

Non Fiction Workshop

Professor

 William Weaver

Schedule

 Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 309
Students are first asked to write on assigned topics in a specific nonfiction genre (review, travel), to provoke discussion of the genre and of the special demands made by writing short nonfiction. This is not, however, a journalism course, and later the participants may choose a genre - autobiography, for example - in which to write a longer, more substantial piece. All work is discussed by the group, and if revision seems opportune, writers may be asked to produce a second version of their works. Limited to twelve students; pass or fail grade.

CRN

 10292

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 333 Upper College Seminar

Title

Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Professor

 Bradford Morrow

Schedule

 Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 101
The diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed by innovative contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. In this course we will closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last quarter century in order to begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of work by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, and others. One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

CRN

 10325

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 GER 336 Upper College Seminar

Title

Günter Grass

Professor

 Susan Bernofsky

Schedule

 Mon 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 304

Cross-listed: Literature

See German section for description.

CRN

 10302

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 390 Upper College Seminar

Title

Introduction to Critical Theory

Professor

 Nancy Leonard

Schedule

 Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 306

Cross listed: Integrated Arts, Philosophy and the Arts

A first course in contemporary critical theory especially intended for just-moderated majors and other students interested in, but new to theory. The seminar will discuss accessible but challenging readings drawn from approaches loosely grouped under the term poststructuralism: semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian history, and postmodernism. Students will learn key terms and concerns, analyze arguments, and create convincing responses; they will write and exchange work frequently. Theorists to be read include Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Butler, Kristeva, deLauretis, Althusses, Williams, Bourdieu, and Lyotard.

CRN

 10042

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3971 Upper College Seminar

Title

Workshop in Exposition, Analysis, and Argument

Professor

 William Wilson

Schedule

 Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm ASP 302
A workshop for accomplished writers who wish to explore ways of writing about ideas effectively. The approach will not be by way of "textbook strategies" for these categories, the effort will be to liberate students from a too strict adherence to what many seem to consider the "academic rules" though it should be clear that does not mean "free" and undisciplined writing. Attention will be given to sentences and paragraphs as well, and to usage, diction and figures of speech as well as to overall form. Students in all disciplines are welcome, in fact encouraged: requires submission of a sample of writing. Not remedial. Candidates for admission should submit an example of critical writing for a course to Box 505, Campus Mail, by Wednesday, December 1st.

CRN

 10436

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 425

Title

Narrative Strategies

Professor

 Bradford Morrow

Schedule

 Mon 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 101
Intended for the serious writer interested in engaging the theory that reading is a primary function of creating fiction, this seminar will explore, through particularized reading and responsive writing, the ways a literary narrative best finds its expression, its formal voice. Students will study contemporary fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Richard Powers, Angela Carter, Rick Moody, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Robert Coover, and others. Class discussions will focus on the variety of technical means by which the author discloses her or his story, and on intensive workshop discussion of student writing. Expect to write one full-length critical essay about, and two original works of fiction patterned on books read in the course. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail, or to Prof. Morrow's office (Fairbairn 207) by 12:00 noon on Monday, November 29th.