CRN	14009	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2014
Title	The Novel in English, II
Professor	Deirdre d'Albertis
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am – 12:50 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

In this course (the second of a two part divisible sequence) we will continue our investigation of the realist tradition in English fiction, beginning with Victorian multi-plot construction and working our way toward the formal innovation of the modernist novel. Central texts may include: Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Bronte, Jane Eyre, Dickens, Bleak House, Eliot, Middlemarch, Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, James, The Ambassadors, Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Lawrence, Women in Love, Woolf, To the Lighthouse and Joyce, if time permits. We will supplement our textual studies with readings in narrative theory and the history of the novel.

CRN	14225	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2015
Title	American Indian Fictions
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 205

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights, SRE

By the time that D'Arcy McNickle, the first major American Indian novelist, began publishing his work, Indians--the currently preferred self-description of the people sometimes referred to as "Native Americans"—had been stock literary figures for over three hundred years. In works ranging from Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper and the southwestern novels of Willa Cather, white American writers had collectively generated a simultaneously fixed and ungrounded notion of "Indianness." On the one hand, Indians could not belong to the nation because they existed outside of time, beyond change. On the other hand, their Indianness, the imaginary essence of what they were, could be repeatedly sought out, appropriated, and refigured by white people in need of a respite from modernity. As the critic Philip J. Deloria has written, the figure of the Indian in white American culture "gave the nation a bedrock, for it fully engaged the contradiction most central to a range of American identities--that between an unchanging, essential Americanness and the equally American liberty to make oneself into something new." In this course, we will read the tradition of fiction–about-Indians and Indianness in relation to the tradition of fiction–by-Indians that has sprung up in its wake. Authors include Rowlandson, Brown, Cooper, Melville, Helen Hunt Jackson, Cather, Black Elk, McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, LouiseErdrich, and Sherman Alexie.

CRN	14235	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	LIT 2153
Title	Myth and Variation in Russian Modernism
Professor	Jennifer Day
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 306

Cross-listed: Russian Studies

From fin-de-siècle Decadence to “writing for the desk drawer” under Stalin, Russian literature and arts of the first decades of the twentieth century are marked by a preoccupation with the relationship between art and life. For Russian writers and artists of this period, looking to the future, to another reality, or to a higher state of being—often against the background of catastrophic sociohistorical contexts—implied a creative process that may be best characterized as mythology in the making. This course will trace the interrelationship between various Russian art forms of the Modernist period, including literature, theater and film, visual arts, and architecture, from the turn of the twentieth century to 1940. We will also treat the links between art, gender, and politics as pre-Revolutionary mythologies of “life into art” evolve into their post-Revolutionary versions. Students will read works by Sologub, Bely, Blok, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky, Zamiatin, Babel, Olesha, Platonov, and Bulgakov as well as Modernist group manifestos and recent critical analysis. Conducted in English.

CRN	14286	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2154
Title	Dark Comedy: Humor in African American Literature
Professor	Mat Johnson
Schedule	Tu Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 204

Cross-listed: AADS, American Studies, SRE

In Dark Comedy, students will examine the use of humor, particularly satire, as a tool in African American literature for identifying and deconstructing the absurdities of race, assimilation, and historic memory. We will begin with the newly emboldened writers of the Harlem Renaissance, reading both George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman’s distorted, fly-on-the-wall critiques of the movement, and then see how their political comedy was furthered by Ralph Ellison with Invisible Man. Through the humorous mythic yarns of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, as well as Charles Johnson’s Ox-Herding Tale, we will identify how African and southern American folklore informed the modern comic tradition. Using Chester Himes’s Pinktoes and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, we’ll explore the relation of gender and status to the choice of satire. With Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and Percival Everett’s Erasure, we will attempt to identify not only why a disproportionate percentage of Black America’s strongest writers have continued to be drawn to the satiric form over the last three decades, but also what similarities their messages might have.

CRN	14287	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2155
Title	African American Autobiographical Narrative
Professor	Mat Johnson
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 306

Cross-listed: AADS, American Studies, Human Rights, SRE

The goal of African American Autobiographical Narrative is to gain an understanding of the autobiography as not only the core medium of black American literature for its first two centuries, but also as a vehicle of both artistic and political power through the Civil Rights Movement and into the modern era. We will start with Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through the works of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. Using Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery as a bridge between the worlds of bondage and freedom, we will continue on through the Renaissance with Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea and into the big black autobiographies of the mid-century, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promise Land. From there, we will look at the autobiographical narrative’s continuation into the Black Power era with Assata Shakur’s Assata and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. Finally, we’ll conclude with the contemporary memoir, as exemplified by John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers.

CRN	14160	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	CLAS / LIT 216
Title	Ancient Law and Human Rights
Professor	Alan Zeitlin
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Classical Studies, HR

The course will focus on nascent concepts of human rights in several ancient cultures: Greece, Rome, Israel, and China. Though none of these cultures had a formal law or doctrine of human rights, it is nevertheless worthwhile asking to what extent fundamental modern notions (such as the right of the individual to speak freely and not to be subjected to torture, rape, or collective punishment) exist in the jurisprudence, customs, philosophy and literature (including historiography) of these cultures. Such an inquiry will illuminate not only the roots of some of our modern ideas about human rights, but also the nature of many of the barriers that remain to implementing them.

CRN	14227	Distribution	B/F
Course No.	LIT 223
Title	Workshop in Cultural Reportage
Professor	Peter Sourian
Schedule	Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 107

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, but not restricted to majors.

CRN	14017	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2241
Title	Life in the Medieval Church
Professor	Karen Sullivan
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians interpreted and reinterpreted the accounts of the lives of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the martyrs of the early Church and strove to imitate these lives in their own daily existence. In the course of this ever-renewed return to the sources, Christians struggled to adapt these early models of sanctity to a world radically different, in its social, economic, and cultural organization, from that in which their predecessors had lived. Should one remove oneself from the corruption of the world or remain within it and attempt to reform it? Should one attach oneself to the wretched of the earth, sharing their poverty and misery, or should one seek power in order to bring society in conformity with God’s will? Should one study classical literature and philosophy, in the hope that they will strengthen one’s faith, or avoid these fields, in the fear that they will weaken it? The history of the Church in the Middle Ages is largely the history of changing answers to these questions, as late antique models of sanctity give way to monasticism; as challenges to the Church arise both from within, in the form of the Gregorian and other reformers, and from without, in the form of heretical sects; as the mendicant orders, with their scholastic training, gain intellectual and, ultimately, political power within ecclesiastical institutions; and finally, as the practitioners of devotio moderna, the often anti-scholastic spirituality identified most with early Netherlandish painting, comes to prominence on the eve of the Renaissance. Readings will be drawn from biblical, patristic, Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan, and other sources.

CRN	14069	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 229
Title	Classics of American Drama
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Wed Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: American Studies, Theater

We will trace the development of American theater back to the immediate post-Revolutionary era through nineteenth-century popular drama and the emergence, in the twentieth, of fruitful tensions between American "middlebrow" entertainment and the modernist avant-garde. In the vigorous responses of American playwrights to complex social and historical questions, we will ask how, within an often commercial medium, our playwrights have crafted visions of American life. Playwrights include Royall Tyler, Dion Boucicault, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, August Wilson and others from both modern and contemporary American theater.

CRN	14433	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 246
Title	African Women Writers
Professor	Chinua Achebe
Schedule	Wed 1:30 pm – 3:50 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: AADS, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, SRE

The dramatic emergence of modern African literature midway through the twentieth century was quickly amplified within a decade by the distinct voices of a remarkable band of women writers whose work is now established as a significant part of Africa’s revolutionary literature. The course will study novels and short stories by some of the leading practitioners from the 1960s to the present, in English originals or translations from French and Arabic. Among the writers to be considered are Flora Nwapa, Marianna Ba, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Alifa Rifaat, Bessie Head, and Ama Ata Aidoo.

CRN	14079	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 2502
Title	Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Professor	Nancy Leonard
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Theater

An intensive exploration of all of Shakespeare’s important tragedies, together with some reading from theatrical history and criticism. We will sometimes watch a Shakespeare film or work with a play as performers, but primarily this is a literature course for first- and second-year students. Topics will include contemporary issues like race and ethnicity, gender, the body, and political ethics, but historical awareness will also be important. Plays to be read include Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

CRN	14071	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	CLAS / LIT 275
Title	Poetry and Athletics
Professor	William Mullen
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 201

The meanings to be seen in athletics have stirred the meditations and praises of poets in many different cultures and genres. This course will study the strange intersections of the physical, the social and the sacred we still recognize in sports. We will allot equal time to three different sets of readings: 1) victory odes for the ancient Greek games, principally those of Pindar, often considered the greatest lyric poet of the West, concerned with boxing, wrestling, running, pentathlon, pancratium, chariot, and dithyramb; 2) case studies of the wedding of poetry to athletics in other cultures on the other side of the world, as in songs for the Hawaiian royal surfing festivals, tales of the foundational ball game in the Mayan "Popol Vuh", and chants to accompany African-Brazilian capoeira; 3) an anthology of sports poetry in 19th and 20th century Europe and America, concerned with jousting, running, bullfighting, football, basketball, and baseball. We will also follow planning for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games and its ancillary cultural events. In all three parts we will read not only the poems themselves but also some scholarship by sports historians on the particular athletic events they reflect. All readings will be in English, and no prerequisites are necessary.

CRN	14314	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	LIT 280
Title	The Heroic Age
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

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.