CRN

15506

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 121

Title

First Year Fiction Workshop

Professor

Peter Sourian

Schedule

Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 309
This course is for students who propose a commitment to writing and have already written stories or worked toward narrative text of any length. Also, reading of selected writers. Group response, analysis, and evaluation. Discussion of general principles. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration, with optional cover letter (be sure to specify the course number) via Campus Mail, to Professor Sourian by 10:00 am on Wednesday, November 28th.


CRN

15507

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 123

Title

First Year Poetry Workshop

Professor

Celia Bland

Schedule

Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm PRE 101
This workshop is for 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. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Bland BY 10:00 am on Wednesday, November 28th.


CRN

15349

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2119

Title

Shakespeare and Mozart

Professor

William Wilson

Schedule

Tu Fr 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 101

Cross-listed: Music

Three comedies of Shakespeare, concerned, as comedy almost always is, with problems of sexuality and marriage in relation to the state, and three operas by Mozart (libretti by Da Ponte), concerned with the same problems. The works thus address similar matters in distinctly different periods, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and in related but distinct media, the play and the opera. Times for watching video presentations of most of these works will be established to fit schedules of the participants in the seminar. There may also be an opportunity to see one or more in a live production.


CRN

15302

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 307

Cross-listed: German Studies

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

15289

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2138

Title

Women and Culture

Professor

Fiona Wilson

Schedule

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

Cross-listed: Gender Studies

Current feminist criticism rejects the notion that any single narrative can describe female identity. Instead, emphasis is placed on diversity of standpoint - on the effects of cultural and racial experience, of age, class, gender, and of sexual orientation, on how writers write about (and readers read about) women. This class seeks to introduce students to a selection of narratives about femininity. Students are invited to interrogate these narratives for themselves using such fundamental critical tools as literary research and close reading. Works by Milton, Bronte, Dickinson, Freud, Woolf, Stein, and Morrison, among others.


CRN

15038

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2144

Title

Medieval Dream Visions

Professor

Mark Lambert

Schedule

Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

"I was weary of wandering and went to rest At the bottom of a broad bank by a brook's side, And as I lay lazily looking in the water I slipped into a slumber, it sounded so pleasant. There came to me reclining there a most curious dream..." So the fourteenth-century poet William Langland moves us into Piers Plowman, his great allegory, and with more or less similar passages begin many of the most interesting French and English poems of the later Middle Ages. In this course we will read (in modern English translations) some of the best of the poems about love and religion and society and politics which were presented to their audiences as accounts of things observed in dreams. Works studied will include: Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the Dream of the Rood, the Dream of Rhonabwy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Winner and Waster, Pearl, the Book of the Duchess, the Pariament of Fowls, the Cuckoo and the Nightingale.


CRN

15503

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2147

Title

Explorations in Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay

Professor

Susan Rogers

Schedule

Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm PRE 101
This course is for students who want to develop both their creative writing and their analytical thinking through writing essays that begin in the details of everyday life. Emphasis will be placed on rendering the details of a life, on exploring how scenes and characters are developed in nonfiction, how dialog can be used, how the form can fracture from linear narrative to the collage. Those students with creative writing experience can translate and develop skills used both in poetry and fiction writing. Students will gain an appreciation for the genre through reading contemporary essayists. The central text will be Philip Lopates' The Art of the Essay: 1999. Emphasis will rest on the student's own writings, which will be critiqued in a workshop format with an eye for the craft of the work. This course is for students with experience in writing workshops, fiction writers and poets who want to explore another genre, and writers who enjoy expressing ideas through the lens of personal experience. Those who bring knowledge and learning from other disciplines are encouraged to apply. Candidates must submit samples of their work with contact information (email address) via campus mail to Susan Rogers by Nov. 30. Those accepted into the course will be notified by Dec. 2.


CRN

15039

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 2148

Title

Literature in the City: Urban landscapes in Italian literature from Dante to Calvino

Professor

Carlo Zei

Schedule

Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 115

Cross-listed: Italian Studies

Fabled cities like Florence, Venice, and Rome have in time acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving recurrent motifs and metaphors. In the late 19th century that tradition evolved, when a new kind of urban spectator-writer looked at the city crowd and responded to it as an entertaining spectacle. Again, in the early 20th century, the technological visions of the Futurists provided a new vocabulary to narrate the city. Since then, the codification of the city has kept changing, and the texts describing (and inscribed in) its topography are more diverse than ever. In this class we will explore the ways in which Italian writers have struggled to define the city and its metaphors. In a wider theoretical framework, this class focuses on the issue of the significance of setting in literature through the reading of "textual cities" such as Dante's "Città di Dite", Boccaccio's beloved Naples, Calvino's "Invisible Cities", Gadda's Rome, Goldoni's Venice, Svevo's Trieste.The course is offered in English and all the Italian texts will be available in the English translation.Texts: Excerpts from: Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Goldoni, Manzoni, D'Annunzio, Svevo, Pirandello, Gadda, Moravia, Calvino and others. Other readings T.B.A. on the topic by: Saint Augustine, G.B. Vico, C. Baudelaire, C. Fourier, B. Croce, R. Chambers, S. Freud, W. Benjamin, R. Barthes, J. Derrida, S. Zizek, F. Jameson, and others.


CRN

15019

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 215

Title

Victorian Essays & Detectives

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

Mon Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 307

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.


CRN

15258

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 221

Title

Writers' Workshop: Prose Fiction

Professor

Peter Sourian

Schedule

Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 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. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration, with optional cover letter (be sure to specify the course number) via campus mail to Prof. Sourian by 10:00 am on Wednesday, November 28th.


CRN

15307

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 234

Title

Literature of the Crusades

Professor

Karen Sullivan

Schedule

Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

In November of 1095, on a field outside Clermont, Pope Urban II, long frustrated by the internecine warfare between Christian barons, urged an assembled council, "Let them turn their weapons dripping with the blood of their brothers against the enemy of the Christian faith .... Let them hasten, if they love their souls, under their captain Christ to the rescue of Sion." A great shout of "Deus lo volt" or "God wills it" arose from the crowd around him, and the idea of the crusade was thus born in the western imagination. For much of the following two centuries, Franks departed in large battalions to attempt to gain possession of the Holy Lands, now under Muslim control, and, for many centuries thereafter, they dreamed of reviving such a quest. In this course, we will be studying the considerable literature produced around the Crusades, which includes epic and lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons, in an attempt to understand the mentality that inspired lords and peasants, knights and monks, and adults and children to take up the cross. While we will be considering primarily the Frankish perspective, attention will also be paid to the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish points of view on these conflicts. What happens when religion goes to war, when escatology meets history, and when the celestial Jerusalem becomes identified with the earthly Jerusalem? If the Crusades continue to provide a principal model of the encounter between West and East, what exactly is implied by this paradigm? This course will be coordinated with Professor Brockopp's Religion 232, Cairo as Microcosm of the Islamic World, and several joint events will be planned.


CRN

15308

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 238

Title

Modern African Fiction

Professor

Chinua Achebe

Schedule

Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: AADS, MES Related interest: French Studies

The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of modern African literature. This course will introduce this new writing through a few key texts in its fiction. Works written originally in French or Arabic will be read in their English translations. The course will relate the literature, wherever appropriate to Africa's past traditions as well as its contemporary reality. The authors to be studied include Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, Ferdinand Oyono, Amos Tutuola, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tayeb Salih.


CRN

15285

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 264

Title

The Nineteenth-Century Continental Novel

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Russian, French and German 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

15268

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 2702

Title

Russia on the Opera Stage

Professor

Marina Kostalevsky

Schedule

Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

Modern Russian culture, although it represents an inseparable part of European culture, has a distinctly original character, initially shaped by the Orthodox Christian tradition passed on from Byzantium. This tradition eventually came into contact and conflict with the flow of West European ideas. The monumental achievements of European civilization were absorbed and confronted, transformed and blended with the unique Russian experience. The history of Russian music predictably echoed that path. The early development of Russian music benefited from appropriation of the Byzantine unaccompanied choral singing and at the same time suffered from the absence of instrumental music. By comparison, the Western European music combined the use of vocal and instrumental faculties and resulted in the creation of numerous forms of musical art, including the most elaborate one: opera. The flourishing of this genre in Europe consequently had direct impact on the progress of musical life in Russia; during the nineteenth century, opera became the main agent for (using Richard Taruskin's apt words ) "defining Russia musically." The course will offer the students an opportunity to explore Russian culture through the medium of Russian opera. A considerable part of the discussions will be dedicated to the anxieties of Italian influence (including Verdi's) on Russian composers. The material will include selected literary texts, musical recordings, and opera performances on video. Also, the students will have a chance to attend a live performance of Sergei Prokofiev's "War and Peace" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. No knowledge of Russian or training in music is required. Conducted in English.


CRN

15027

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 272

Title

The Irish Renaissance

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies

The Irish Renaissance of the first few decades of the twentieth century was the creation of those cultural leaders who founded the Abbey Theatre to nourish a specifically Irish (not British, not European) imagination. The revival exploited three sources: the mythical Ireland of Celtic legend where Cuchulain, Maeve, Finn, and Fergus waged epic battles over cows and birthrights with the aid and interference of magic; western Ireland, poetry and story; and a political history that is a persistent record of invasion, oppression, and faction, and of heroic gestures accompanied by a mood of tragic failure. The course begins with a brief history of Ireland, concentrating on three discrete moments: the end of the seventeenth century and the battles of Boyne and Aughrim, the abortive rising of 1798, and the 1890s spirit of nationalistic renewal. Then we consider the Abbey Theatre and its reconstruction of the legends of the past and the use of idioms and characters of the west of Ireland, chiefly in the drama of Yeats and Synge. We will look at the development of these themes in the literature associated with the troubles of 1916-22 and in later writings, which continue or challenge the themes of the Renaissance, including works by Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Flann O'Brien, and Brendan Behan.


CRN

15025

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 208

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.