LIT I / 100 LEVEL COURSES

CRN

12286

   

Course No.

LIT 100 / FSEM

Title

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Professor

Donna Ford Grover

Schedule

Mon Wed 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 304

"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

12296

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 108 / FSEM

Title

William Wordsworth: The Prelude

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 202

The seminar will examine closely William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, "The Prelude." The focus of our reading will be the rhetoric of self-presentation, the status of the speaker or the self in poetry and particularly in autobiography, and the relation between the self and others (history, nature, politics) as it happens in language. Along the way we will consult some related texts by Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets, and examine some of the literary, philosophical, and historical events (especially the French Revolution and Enlightenment, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, German Romanticism) which inform the poem. Primary texts will be supplemented by reading in contemporary criticism and theory on Wordsworth (de Man, Hartman, and others), autobiography, and Romanticism.

CRN

12366

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 111

Title

Shakespeare: Five Comedies

Professor

Robert Rockman

Schedule

Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 310

A study of five plays exemplifying Shakespeare's versatile practice in comedy - The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labor's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure. Topics to be explored: writing for Shakespeare's stage; ideas about comedy in Shakespeare's time (and in our own); the characters and themes typical of Shakespeare's comedy; comedy and tragicomedy; language in the plays. Students must be willing to read aloud from the plays in class. Short to longer papers. Quizzes and/or exams. Limited enrollment. Lower college students only.