CRN

14461

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 301

Title

Reading for Writers

Professor

Mary Caponegro

Schedule

By arrangement

A major conference for moderated writing majors. See Prof. Caponegro at registration for details.

 

CRN

14080

Distribution

A/B

Course No.

PHIL / THEO 301

Title

Working Theologies:  Søren Kierkegaard

Professor

Daniel Berthold / Nancy Leonard

Schedule

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

This seminar will explore some of the main paths taken by the Danish Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard towards theology.  The seminar, limited to fifteen,  is planned for students concentrating in theology as well as moderated philosophy majors and others interested in the subject. While Kierkegaard rejected the title of “theologian,” and called himself “essentially a poet” (or sometimes a “humorist”), his poetic experimentation -- even in the most apparently non-theological “aesthetic” works of many of his pseudonyms, and even in the many tracts written in the last five years of his authorship which together make up his Attack Upon Christendom -- was, in his words, “from first to last in the service of God.” We will commit ourselves to interrogating just what this service amounted to -- a commitment requiring our willingness to enter the labyrinth, since whatever else it was, Kierkegaard’s service to God was exquisitely complicated by his commitment to the authorial strategy of “indirect communication,” a mode of discourse marked by disguise, hidden intentions, the proliferation of competing voices, and what he called “the disappearance of the author.” Readings will be drawn from such pseudonymous works as Either / Or  (Victor Eremita), Repetition (Constantine Constantius), Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Johann Climacus), Training in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus), as well as some of the sermons or “Edifying Discourses” written under Kierkegaard’s own name. We will also read a variety of writers who have engaged Kierkegaard’s authorship in ways central to the several projects of modernity and postmodernity, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Sylviane Agacinski (and other feminist commentators).

 

CRN

14239

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 3113

Title

Poethical Wagers

Professor

Joan Retallack

Schedule

Wed               1:30 pm -  3:50 pm       OLIN 308

The writing and reading of poetry has always been an enactment of forms of life with identifiable values and consequences. Whether these lie in the way the forms work or more explicitly in statements made, every poet is—in her or his poetics—choosing a specific kind of public role. In particularly troubled times like our own, poets tend to make more conscious decisions about the politics of their forms. Historically, these decisions have resulted in familiar categories like futurist, constructivist, marxist and feminist poetries, or, more generally, poetries of witness. Currently developing genres explore the idea of responsibility to community via  documentary  and collaborative modes and the possibility of an ecopoetics. There are also poetries whose engagement with their contemporary moment is less obvious in terms of political message, more about developing formal and material principles within the poem that act counter to, say, consumerism, patriarchy, empire. In this seminar we will look at poetries from the American Civil War and turn-of-the-(19th) century Europe as well as 20th century world poetries of witness, work from the American sixties and the post-modern period in America and Europe. Our driving question will be, What do these works tell us about poetics of courage and commitment in the face of the most destructive habits of our species?  This is a practice-based seminar. You will have the opportunity to write numerous essays, research an area of social concern that is of particular interest to you, and engage in a poetic project of your own.

 

CRN

14233

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3119

Title

Gender and Romanticism

Professor

Fiona Wilson

Schedule

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

Cross-listed:  Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights

It has been said that at the end of the eighteenth century, British men and women resembled two opposing tribes—each utterly ignorant of the other’s customs, dialects, and sacred beliefs.  The social changes that swept Europe in the 1790s, however, also affected traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity.  Just as Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man” provoked Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” the spirit of the age stimulated literary discourses about dandies and bluestockings, natural mothers and men of feeling, military heroes, amazons, and cockney poets.  This seminar seeks to engage advanced students in a discussion about the significance—and long-term effects, if any—of these discourses.  How effective was Wollstonecraft’s call for “a revolution in female manners”?  How did Byron model masculinity?  How did gender impinge upon notions of class, nationalism, and imperial expansion? Works by, among others, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Hemans, Smith, Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, Scott, and Owenson.   Class size limited. 

Pre-requisite: English Literature III,  Comparative Literature III or a course in Romanticism.

 

CRN

14455

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3126

Title

An Exalted Plainness: The Art of Nonfiction Prose

Professor

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Schedule

Wed    3:00 pm – 5:20 pm  OLIN 301

It’s always tempting to pretend that nonfiction prose is simply the echo of today – a formalized version of the speaking voice. But it has deep antecedents in literary history, often more expansive in form, emotional content, and the power of the sentence itself than what we see today. This course cuts across generic boundaries and historical periods – from Elizabethan England forward and from the essay outward – in search of useful literary examples of nonfiction prose. Above all this is a practical seminar, intended to amplify and extend the imaginative tools and the grammar a student already possesses. Don’t fear the word “grammar”! It is just the name of the language we speak about sentences.

 

CRN

14260

Distribution

C

Course No.

LIT 3206

Title

Evidence

Professor

Thomas Keenan

Schedule

Tu                 1:30 pm -  3:50 pm       OLIN 305

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

What does literature teach us about evidence? Of what can it be evidence?  Evidence, etymologically, is what we see, what is exposed or obvious to the eye, and to the extent that something is evident it should help us make decisions, form conclusions, or reach judgments.  Hence its legal meanings.  On the basis of these traces of what has happened —whether in the form of statistics, images, or testimony—we decide, and so their ethical and theoretical stakes are high.  Sometimes what we see and read seems to compel action, while at other times it appears to immobilize us.  As more and more of our world is exposed to view, what becomes of the would-be foundational character of evidence?  What is it to ignore evidence?  This seminar will explore the theory and practice of evidence, with special attention paid to (a) accounts in the mass media of, and (b) testimonies and forensic evidence about, the most extreme cases (genocide, atrocity, terror, human rights violations).  We will examine this literature and imagery, including much documentary material from the media, and read it all alongside contemporary literary and political theory, in order to pose some basic and complex questions about decision, bearing witness, and responsibility.  Readings and screenings from Gilles Peress, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Luc Boltanski, and others.

 

CRN

14024

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3306

Title

Scholasticism vs. Humanism

Professor

Karen Sullivan

Schedule

Fr                  1:30 pm -  3:50 pm       LC 118

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Medieval Studies, Theology

Throughout the Middle Ages, intellectual life was dominated by scholastics, who sought to integrate reason and faith, logic and revelation, classical philosophy and the Christian Gospels. For many of these thinkers, the City of Man, in which we now live, should ideally mirror the City of God, in which we hope one day to reside: both are single, unified, exquisitely ordered and hierarchical structures, in which the individual part is harmoniously integrated into the greater whole.  During the Renaissance, however, intellectual discourse was taken over by humanists, who stressed empiricism over abstraction, rhetoric over dialectic, and Plato over Aristotle as the means of access to truth. With experience now privileged over logic, the personal, subjective perception expressed in literature became prized over the impersonal, seemingly objective cosmos of philosophy.  In this seminar, we will be exploring the tension between scholastic and humanist thought against the background of the rise of the university, the shift from Gothic to Renaissance architecture, the discovery of the New World, and the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, as well as within the context of more recent historical eras.  Authors to be read include Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.

 

CRN

14419

Distribution

A/B

Course No.

LIT 333

Title

Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Professor

Bradford Morrow

Schedule

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

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 Russell Banks, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatjie, Jamaica Kincaid, and others.  One or two writers, among them, Russell Banks, are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

 

CRN

14431

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3362

Title

The Essay

Professor

Luc Sante

Schedule

Th        1:30 pm – 3:50 pm   OLIN 304

This course will involve reading and writing in equal amounts. Every week we will read one or more significant essays, across the history of the form: Montaigne, Robert Burton, Hazlitt, Macauley, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mencken, and on to the present day. Every week we will also write an essay, trying out various modes: personal, polemical, critical, historical, and so on. We will concentrate on style, literary architecture, rhetoric, persuasiveness, consistency, logic, measure, and audacity. Mere personal expression will not suffice. Judgment will be severe.

 

CRN

14014

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 342

Title

Literature of the Double

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

Wed               10:30 am - 12:50 pm     PRE 101

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

The concept and consequences of liberating a second self. The majority of readings are late nineteenth-century: Dostoyevsky, Browning, LeFanu, Wilde, Stevenson, Stoker. Also considered are the origins of doubleness in folklore and romantic storytelling, some psychological commentary by Robert Burton, Freud, and Otto Rank, and the use of the theme of the double in twentieth-century autobiographical fiction.

 

CRN

14228

Distribution

B/C

Course No.

LIT 3501

Title

19th Century Continental Novels

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

Tu                 10:30 am - 12:50 pm     OLIN 101

Cross-listed: French Studies

Related interest:  German Studies, Russian 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, intellectual and political trends and developments on the Continent during the 19th Century. Readings include:  Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Stendhal’s The Red and the Black; Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Balzac’s Cousin Bette; Fontane’s Effi Briest.  A tutorial will be offered to those interested in reading the original French text.  Some film versions of the novels are viewed and critically evaluated as to their fidelity to the original.

 

CRN

14067

Distribution

B

Course No.

LIT 3801

Title

Indian Fiction

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

Schedule

Mon Wed       10:00 am - 11:20 am     OLIN 309

Cross-listed:  SRE

Since 1980, when Salman Rushdie's masterpiece Midnight's Children was published, it has become increasingly clear that Indian Anglophone writers have been producing some of the best fiction in the world, rivaling the most brilliant novelists in England, Africa, the U.S. and Latin America.  This explosion of talent has occurred over the past fifty years, following the birth of modern India.  Colonial rule had lasted more than 150 years, and to this day, as a consequence, the most successful Indian novelists write in English.  Even before independence, the collision of East and West inspired a number of English writers--most notably Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster--and several Indian writers have re-imagined that collision from a modern post-colonial perspective.  The contradiction of writing about Indian life in the language of the departed British Raj has created a cultural hybridity which some of these novelists turn to advantage.  In addition to Rushdie we will read works by R.K. Narayan, who writes about village life; V.S. Naipaul, whose greatest work has been about the Indian diaspora in Trinidad and his own "arrival" in England; and Anita Desai, whose most recent novel contrasts Indian and American family life.  Among the most impressive younger writers we will read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance  and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, both of which are concerned with the caste problem of the "Untouchables", plus a selection of short stories.

 

CRN

14418

Distribution

B/F

Course No.

LIT 425

Title

Narrative Strategies

Professor

Bradford Morrow

Schedule

Mon               10:30 am - 12:50 pm     OLIN 107

With special emphasis on post-genre fabulism and the New Gothic, this workshop is intended for the writer interested in engaging the theory that reading is a primary function of creating fiction.  We will explore, through selected readings and responsive writing, the ways a literary narrative best finds its expression, its voice. Students will study contemporary fiction by David Foster Wallace, Jamaica Kincaid, Angela Carter, Rick Moody, Russell Banks, John Crowley, Kelly Link, and others.  Class discussion will focus on the variety of technical means by which the author develops a story, and on intensive workshop discussion of student writing.  Expect to write one  critical essay about the style and technique of the writers we are reading, as well as two original works of fiction patterned on texts in the course, and a third story of independent work in progress.  Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with cover letter, via campus mail to Prof. Morrow by December 2nd.