CRN

 13395

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3070

Title

Medieval Human Rights

Professor

 Karen Sullivan

Schedule

 Fr 1:30 pm -3:50 pm LC 120
Anyone who has encountered the media's constant references to Afghanistan's Taliban as "medieval" knows that the Middle Ages represents a time of religious fanaticism, intellectual obscurantism, and rampant violence. The "medieval," more than any other category, continues to be used as the other against which modern society defines itself, and the Enlightenment, which popularized the concept of the rights of man, continues to perceived as the barrier protecting us against a barbaric and oppressive past. Yet is it fair to assume that just because a society had no notion of human rights, as we understand them, that there were no human rights? To what extent did medieval political concepts, such as those the just war, feudalism, or chivalry, provide protections similar to those that we enjoy today under different terms? In this course we will read a series of classic medieval texts, whether literary, historical, or theological, in conjunction with some modern theoretical texts writings to pursue answers to these questions. Topics to be considered include the rise of the crusades and of anti-Semitism, trials by ordeal and torture, heresy and Inquisition, virginity and witchcraft, sodomy and public execution. Augustine and Aquinas, troubadour poets and Christine de Pizan, King Arthur and Vlad the Impaler will all be juxtaposed. If the past is a foreign country, as some say, can understanding the medieval past help us to understand foreign countries whose cultures remain opaque to us?

CRN

 13074

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3110

Title

James Joyce's Ulysses

Professor

 Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

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

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies

Participants in this seminar pool their ideas about text and context. Recent Joyce criticism will be emphasized. Prior knowledge of Joyce and his early writings, notably Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is required.

CRN

 13521

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3114

Title

William Blake and His World

Professor

 Joel Kovel

Schedule

 Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 301
William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the most remarkable artists in the Western tradition. Exquisite lyricist, composer of fantastically difficult philosophical poems, recoverer of the tradition of illuminated manuscript, superb engraver, visionary painter, technical innovator, political radical, subject of hallucinatory-mystical experiences, and utter commercial failure, Blake continues to astound. In this course, we will consider the life and work as a whole, as they were played out in relation to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism. Blake will be regarded as progenitor of a coherent and transformative world-view whose implications remain as fresh as they were two centuries ago.

Prerequisite: At least one upper college literature course, or consultation with the professor.

CRN

 13667

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3117

Title

Autobiography, Memory and Lies

Professor

 Luc Sante

Schedule

 Th 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm HEG 201
All writing is autobiographical, it is said, although the recent tide of bad memoirs would suggest that there is only one, dully exhibitionistic way of rendering personal experiences. This course will combine reading and writing in an exploration of the many ways there are of writing about the self, not all of them literal. Readings will include Elizabeth Hardwick's "Sleepless Nights", Andre Breton's "Nadja", Peter Handke's "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams", Michael Ondaatje's "Running in the Family", Stephen Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse", and W.G. Sebald's "Vertigo", and selections from such authors as Benvenuto Cellini, George Borrow, Italo Svevo, Blaise Cendrars, Elias Canetti, Diane di Prima, Georges Perec, and Kathy Acker. Weekly writing assignments will involve approaching the truth via games, dodges, free association, and working against one's own grain.

CRN

 13379

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3224

Title

Advanced Poetry Workshop: Investigative Poetics: Projects And Procedures

A Workshop-Seminar

Professor

 Joan Retallack

Schedule

 Th 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Integrated Arts

Among the many poetic practices identified by schools and genres is one that I like to call "Investigative." This is a poetry of extended projects and procedures designed to explore a range of forms, media, questions, logics, constraints....as well as experiences of our situation in today's world. Underlying assumptions are a) there are things one can know only in the form of poetry, b) a complex world must be engaged-at least some of the time-with complex forms of art. Though some of the projects for this course can involve visual and electronic media, as well as performance dimensions, the emphasis throughout will be on working with language. To bring students into a high level of consciousness about the forms and questions we're addressing, there will be weekly (brief but incisive) writing assignments in relation to our reading/viewing and in-class discussions. You will complete four extended poetic projects, each accompanied by a 3-5 page essay discussing your points of departure, your thinking along the way as you composed the piece, it's relation to the investigations of the class, the material processes you engaged in. There will be a number of poet visitors in conjunction with reading assignments. (Four volumes of poetry are required reading, along with a variety of handouts.) You will also be required to attend poetry readings and other events over the course of the semester.

Candidates must submit samples of their work with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Retallack by noon Tuesday, December 3rd.

CRN

 13495

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 324

Title

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Professor

 Mary Caponegro

Schedule

 Fri 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 101
A workshop on the composition of short stories, for experienced writers. Students will also read short fiction by established writers, and devote significant time to the composition and revision of their own stories. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with cover letter, via campus mail to Prof. Caponegro by noon, Tuesday, December 3rd.

CRN

 13174

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 LIT 3230

Title

'Genus Italicum': Theory, Crisis, and Form in Modern Italian Literature

Professor

 Joseph Luzzi

Schedule

 Tu 1:30 pm -3:50 pm OLIN 304

Cross-listed: Italian Studies

What is unique about the Italian literary tradition? Conversely, in what ways have Italian literary theory and practice influenced the development of other national languages and literatures? This course will examine the exceptional nature of modern Italian literature in light of the major aesthetic and historical developments that have shaped what the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico called the peculiar "sapientia Italorum" ("Italian wisdom"). Among the questions we will explore are: Did Italy have an Enlightenment? Did Italian Romanticism exist? Why did modern Italian artists have such political influence (Manzoni, Verdi, and Verga were all made senators; Mussolini himself was an aspiring novelist). Authors and texts we will study include Vittorio Alfieri's The Prince and Literature, Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters Of Jacopo Ortis, Manzoni's The Betrothed, Verga's House By The Medlar Tree, Futurist manifestoes, theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci, Umberto Eco's semiotics, Italo Calvino's blend of science and fantasy, and the so-called "weak thought" of the post-modernist philosopher Vattimo. We will also examine such themes as literary nationalism and the Italian language question, the relationship of Italian literature to the "sister arts" of cinema and opera, and the forging of a premodern myth of "primitive" Italy in European Romanticism. Taught in English with discussion session to be announced. Option of course work in Italian and biweekly Italian section meeting.

CRN

 13406

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 3303

Title

Writing as Reading as Writing, Part I

Professor

 Ann Lauterbach

Schedule

 Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 305
In this course we will read poems by some of the poets included in the anthology, and comment on them. Weekly assignments will be given in relation to these readings. Some of these assignments will be in the form of a poem, some will be in the form of a critical prose response. Some will be in the form of a poem as a critical response, etc. For example, we might read the poems of Robert Frost, and we will take up the nature of the narration in poetry (as Frost conceived it). The assignment might be to write a narrative poem. We will also, of course, read and comment on your poems written independently of class assignments. The goal of this class is to help you understand the relation between subject and form in developing your poetics; to help you find a critical/analytical vocabulary; to help you discover ways to generate your own writing practice. The idea is that reading poems and critical works on poems are useful aids to writing them. (Note: If you took Part II in the fall, you can take Part I in the spring.)

CRN

 13219

Distribution

 A/B

Course No.

 LIT 333

Title

New Directions in Contemporary Fiction

Professor

 Bradford Morrow

Schedule

 Mon 10:30 am -12:50 pm OLIN 201
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

 13085

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 349

Title

Victorian Bodies

Professor

 Deirdre d'Albertis

Schedule

 Mon 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, Victorian Studies

The very term "Victorian" is synonymous with an outmoded sense of decorum, prudishness, and inhibition. Yet as Foucault memorably asserted, we "other Victorians" remain profoundly influenced by notions of the body and sexual difference established in the nineteenth century. We will study a series of Victorian texts-literary and non-literary-in conjunctions with theories of the construction of sexuality from Freud to Foucault, tracing the most recent origins of such "natural" categories of subjectivity as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, child/adult, and normal/perverse with special attention to the registers of race and class. How do different forms of narrative articulate or confuse these categories? We will also consider Victorian bodies in the aggregate. Why did the body come to be used by the Victorians as a figure for the state? How did British imperial discourse purport to classify and study subject bodies? We will consider these and other questions through our readings of Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hughes, Richard Burton, Robert Baden-Powell, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, John Ruskin, Rudyard Kipling, and Lewis Carroll, among others. Upper College standing assumed; enrollment limited to fifteen.

CRN

 13666

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 353

Title

The Image of Africa in the West

Professor

 Chinua Achebe

Schedule

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

Cross-listed: AADS

What springs to your mind when you hear the word AFRICA? How much of your response derives from knowledge and how much from rumor; how much from fact and how much from fiction; how much from past history and how much from today's media? What role has `serious' literature played in all this? Does the attitude of individual authors make a difference or is everyone of them merely a product of his/her times? The central text of the course will be Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It will be supported by two other depictions of Africa by visitors: Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson and V.S. Naipaul's A Bend In The River. An African perspective will be provided by three texts: an epic from antiquity, Gassirer's Lute, Olauda Equiano's eighteenth century autobiography and a modern West African novel, Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane.

CRN

 13351

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 390

Title

Contemporary Critical Theory

Professor

 Nancy Leonard

Schedule

 Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross listed: Integrated Arts, Philosophy and the Arts

During the last century major changes in the ways works of art and culture were conceived took place under the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism. This course engages key texts in this transformation of our knowledge of language and representation, texts either in vigorous dialogue with the current moment or contemporary texts of poststructuralism. Reading full texts by major theorists and emphasizing student writing and exchange, the seminar will introduce students to semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian history, feminist and postcolonial theory, rhetorical and ideological critique, and postmodernism. Students will learn key terms and concerns, analyze arguments, and create convincing responses. Theorists to be read include Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Butler, Kristeva, Williams, Deleuze, Spivak, Zizek, Baudrillard and Lyotard.

CRN

 13662

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 422

Title

Writing Workshop

Professor

 Robert Kelly

Schedule

 Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 306
A course designed for juniors and seniors, preference to seniors, who are not writing majors, but who might wish to see what they can learn about the world through the act of writing. Every craft, science, skill, discipline can be articulated, and anybody who can do real work in science or scholarship or art can learn to write, as they say, "creatively"--that is, learn how to make what concerns them also interest other people by means of language. This course will give not more than a dozen students the chance to experiment with all kinds of writing. Poetry is the name of an activity, and that activity will sometimes produce objects called poems and sometimes other sorts of texts. Towards all resultant texts our attention will turn. This is not a course in self-expression, but in making new things. No portfolio is required but prospective students must consult with Prof. Kelly prior to registration

CRN

 13656

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 431

Title

Post-genre Fabulism and the New Gothic

Professor

 Bradford Morrow

Schedule

 Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 201
Over the past several decades the critical boundaries between literary novels and genre fiction have become- as the result of ambitious work by a few innovative, pioneering writers - increasingly ambiguous. The earliest gothicists framed their tales within the metaphoric scapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by protagonists whose inverted psyches led them to test the edges of propriety and sanity. Contemporary masters such as Angele Carter, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes, while embracing this same fundamentally dark artistic vision, have radically reinvented and contemporized tropes, settings, and narrative arcs to create a new phase in this historic tradition. This movement, identified as the New Gothic, appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon, which for the purposes of this course is termed New Wave Fabulism, whose achievement is to have taken the genre of fantasy/horror in a similar literary direction. While not breaking allegiance with the fundamental spirit that animates its genre counterparts, writers such as John Crowley, Kelly Link, and Elizabeth Hand are creating a body of serious literary fiction that deserves critical examination. Among others we will read are Ian McEwan, Valerie Martin, Steve Erickson, Neil Gaiman, and Peter Straub. Several of these authors will attend the seminar to discuss their work.