At the center of this course is an intellectual problem that does not submit to easy resolution: "How can we tell the history from the historian?" But the procedure in the course is not bound by this conundrum. Those plays that chronicle English history will be read in their historical sequence while at the same time maintaining an awareness of the sequence of their composition and of their participation in the social and political life of the times in which they were performed. There is also the "history itself" as constructed or reconstructed by Shakespeare's sources and by historians of our times. Thus it will be possible to work towards a complex response to the plays and ultimately to focus in Shakespeare's dramatic achievement.

Mr. Wilson will not be available for Course Consultation on Registration Day. He will be in his office, Aspinwall 102, on Thursday, November 30, and Friday, December 1; or he may be called at 758-4503 any time before Registration Week.

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.

In this course we shall treat T.S.Eliot (1888- 1965), an American poet and thinker as one of the central figures of modernism. Different peculiarities of European (and Russian) modernism will be analyzed through the prism of his ideas and poetics. First we shall try to explore evident similiarity between Eliot's conservative literary criticism and the concepts of his Russian contemporaries. In this context special attention will be paid to one of the most interesting Russian literary critics and thinkers, Vladimir Veidle, whose aesthetic theory in his major work "The Dying of Art" is very close to the one created by T.S.Eliot. We shall analyze the evident parallels between T.S.Eliot's concept and the ideas of Russian Formalists (V.Shklovsky, Tynjanov, Eichenbaum). Special attention will be paid to the tendencies in Russian poetry of the beginning of the twentieth century close to T.S.Eliot's poetics. These tendencies are evident in the works of Russian acmeists, in the poetry of Akmatova, Mandelstam and Brodsky, who will be central to the course and read in translation. Eliot's specific approach to myth is another problem for discussion. Being very close to the one that is evident in "Ulysses" it reflects a peculiar tendency in the modernist poetry also evident in Russian literature in the works of A.Blok and A.Bely. Conducted in English.

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, and by permission of the instructor, but not restricted to majors.

Through their original thinking about drama and theatre these playwrights helped define the directions, sensibility, styles, and themes of the twentieth century's playwriting and performance. The course studies representative plays and nondramatic writings by the six dramatists. The period covered is, approximately, 1880-1940. A few of the plays: The Wild Duck, Ibsen; Miss Julie, Strindberg; Three Sisters, Chekhov; Major Barbara, Shaw; Mother Courage, Brecht; Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill. Supplementary reading. Papers, reports, exams.

This course is focused on the incorporation of oral traditions in African American literary expression. We will identify uses of the sermon, religious and political speeches, toasts, blues vernacular and rap in the development of African American poetries. From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Sonia Sanchez to Carl Hancock Rux, we will discuss the didactic, communicative, expressive and restorative functions of African American poetry.

This course will focus on the literature of Caribbean American women from the Spanish-, French-, and English-speaking Caribbean. We will examine issues of displacement, migration and assimilation in the literature. Through the lens of gender, we will explore the development of ethnic and national identity and the navigation of physical and imaginary geographies. Possible authors include Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, and Judith Ortiz Cofer.

The gothic novel is considered to be the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses and heroines in distress. Its use of melodrama and the macabre often disguise the psychological, sexual, and emotional issues that are in fact more horrifying than the contents of a haunted house. The gothic novel in America has often confronted topics pertinent to American identity and history. In this course we will examine how many American authors used the gothic genre to actually engage with social, political and cultural concerns. We will read novels and short stories that span the 19^th and 20^th century by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson and James Baldwin.

This course explores formal and informal satire from ancient to contemporary times, with special attention to the works of Pope and Swift. Students have the opportunity to experiment with different forms of satire.

Through interdisciplinary study of English, Scottish and Irish culture, we will consider the rise and fall of Victorian values with particular attention to nationalism, imperialism, and domestic ideology. Consulting a variety of texts--novels, plays, essays and historical works--we will also examine changing (and often conflicting) conceptions of crime, sexuality, race, social class, and the position of women in nineteenth-century Britain.

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 19^th 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.

This course focuses on the early vernacular literature of northern and western Europe: epic, saga, elegy. Particular attention is paid to the relation between Christian teachings and tribal memories among the Celts and Teutons, and to changing perceptions of individual identity. Background readings in history and anthropology, and study of representative English, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Spanish, and Scandinavian works.