(Historical studies in the English, American and Comparative literature traditions are organized into three part sequences.)

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, the Carmina Burana poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso, among other authors. A concurrent tutorial will be offered for those who wish to read the original Latin, Old French, or Old Provencal texts.

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.

What's American about early American literature? What makes it something other than the writing of European emigrés inhabiting a strip of the western Atlantic coastline? The answer of many literary historians has been that this writing only begins to become American in the at-first intermittent and tentative act of turning away from a European homeland. We cannot read a body of texts securely defined as "early American literature", in other words; we can only read for the stirrings of identifiably American literariness within a set of texts. In this course, we will study some of the greatest works of English-speaking western Atlantic writers with a special emphasis on those moments when the texts turn away from a European provenance and toward something barely nameable: a mind seemingly without place, a place seemingly without mind. We will study eighteenth-century Native American and African-American literature as an integral part of this process of origination, and we will ultimately examine the persistence of these uncanny American beginnings in "classic" American literature. Readings will include the autobiographies, poems, and sermons of Puritan New England, the travel literature of the South, the personal narratives of African-Americans and Native Americans, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In this course we will study works written between 1865 and 1930--from the post-civil war period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism, and emergent modernism. Authors include Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.