When Virgil's hero Aeneas deserts his beloved Dido in order to fulfill his destiny to found Rome, he establishes the oppositions around which many of the major works of medieval and Renaissance literature would orient themselves. Is civic duty to be preferred to individual love, as Virgil is usually read as suggesting? Is the straight path of epic to be chosen over the wandering itinerary of romance? Are the transcendent truths of Empire and Church to be pursued over the immediate experiences of private life? Medieval literature, with its idealization of courtly ladies and knights errant, is often seen as taking the side of Dido, while Renaissance literature, with its self-conscious return to antique ideals, is usually said to champion Aeneas. With this framework in mind, we will read St. Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, Arthurian romances, Petrarch's Canzoniere, and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, among other authors.

This course examines the perplexing European literary transformation loosely named Romanticism to Modernity. Reading selected texts by a limited number of authors very carefully, we will emphasize the relation between the self and others, as it happens in language: what is it to meet others in words? We will also pursue the problem, posed intensively in these texts, of linking what we think or know with what we do, of the relation between thought and action. Readings from Kleist, Goethe, Hoelderlin, the Shelleys, Keats, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ponge, and Rilke, among others. Frequent writing assignments, and detailed, intensive readings of texts.

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance literature in England, which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of critical vocabulary and imagination, the discovery of the newly important and long-respected works which make up English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Some topics which we will explore include the construction of the author (from "Anonymous" to Shakespeare), the British "nation" imagined and partly created by the literature, the utopian and actual societies - urban, rural, monastic, theatrical - which literature sought to represent. Authors studied, besides Chaucer and Shakespeare, include the Gawain-poet, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and Julian of Norwich. The course is for new and continuing literature majors who want to explore the range and depth of English literature while they fill program requirements.

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

See above.

The contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson has suggested that the central characteristic of the writers of the American Renaissance is "the assumption that the only way to understand the world is metaphorical, that all metaphors are inadequate, and that if you press them hard enough you're delivered into something that requires a new articulation." This is as good a way as any of describing what is "born" in American writing between the years 1830 and 1865 (a new articulation), and how it is born (pressing on and being delivered from metaphors). All of the authors we will study are unusually obsessed with the problem of understanding their world and many of them are unusually aware of language's paradoxical status as the obstructive but necessary medium of that understanding. Robinson observes elsewhere that the project of the American Renaissance "ended before it was completed." The aim of this course is to restart that project and to move, if only infinitesimally, in the direction of its completion. Authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

This course is the second in a sequence of courses that explore major authors and issues in American literature, from its Puritan origins to the twentieth century. Primary attention in this course will be given to works by Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, with intellectual pre-context provided by reference to the Boston Puritans, to Jonathan Edwards, and to Ralph Waldo Emerson. An even longer continuity will be suggested by the inclusion at the term's end of one or two works by William Faulkner. Thus the course will afford an introductory study of varieties of symbolism in the literature of the United States. Each course in the series has its separate integrity, but the three courses together make a coherent sequence, and any two or all three may be taken without disturbing overlap.