****************LITERATURE SEQUENCE COURSES************

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

CRN	14144	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 204A
Title	Comparative Literature A: Ancient Literature from Gilgamesh to Socrates
Professor	James Romm
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

This course will follow the evolution of the literature of the ancient world, from its beginnings in Assyria, Egypt and Babylon to its great flowering in classical Greece. Our focus will be on the figure of the hero, a being who is not quite either mortal or divine, and the tragic relationship of this figure to the gods and to human society. The problem of the hero lies at the heart of the great epics and tragic dramas produced by the ancient world, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, several books of the Bible, Homer's Iliad, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and the Oedipus plays of Sophocles. We will consider all these works and others, and will end with the philosophic hero created by Plato in the person of Socrates.

CRN	14083	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 204B
Title	Comparative Literature II: Baroque, Enlightenment, and the Age of Sensibility
Professor	Gabriela Carrion
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm LC 208

This course will examine the literature of the period 1600-1800, taking into consideration its historical and cultural contexts. We will focus on broad artistic and philosophical movements such as the Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment and explore such topics as Theatrum Mundi, emblems, the Encyclopedia project, and the Storm and Stress movement. Some of the questions we will examine include how private and public spaces are defined during this period; how the discourses on the Enlightenment contributed to revolutionary movements both in Europe and the Americas; and finally how these discourses contributed to contemporary notions of race and gender. Authors include Calderón, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Racine, Vico, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Marquis de Sade, Kant, Goethe, and Wollstonecraft.

CRN	14018	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 204C
Title	Comparative Literature III:Romanticism to Modernism
Professor	Marina van Zuylen
Schedule	Fr 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 201 Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 201

Cross-listed: French Studies, German Studies, Philosophy

Offered as the third installment of the Comparative Literature sequence, this course will explore some of the key issues in nineteenth and early twentieth century poetics. It will organize its readings around two opposing views: should literature carve for itself an autonomous place in the increasingly commercial world of publishing or should it be, as Balzac would have it, the scribbling secretary of the human condition, faithfully mirroring social and economic change? Readings from: Kant, Schlegel, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Rilke, Poe, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Mallarmé, Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Bergson, Proust, Nabokov, and many others. A number of readings will be excepted from literary manifestoes.

CRN	14312	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 250
Title	English Literature I
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 107

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.

CRN	14399	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 251
Title	English Literature II
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
Schedule	Mon Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 305

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, including metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and others, Milton's Paradise Lost, and genre poetry; drama (revenge plays, Restoration, and later, comedies); also the beginnings of the novel.

CRN	14234	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 252
Title	English Literature III
Professor	Fiona Wilson
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 204

This course explores developments in English literature from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century—a period marked by the effects of the French Revolution, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, the trauma of two world wars, the development of regional identities with Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of “Englishness” in a global context. Beginning with “Romantics” and ending with “Moderns,” we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of England and Britain; and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. With close readings in works by Wordsworth, Keats, Dickens, Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, and others.

CRN	14068	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 258
Title	Literature of the U.S. II
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
Schedule	Wed Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 202

Cross-listed: American Studies

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 authors identified with the "American Renaissance" of the 1850s, in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will look at contexts and connections, glancing back at the Puritans and ahead to modern American literature, concluding the semester with one or two works by twentieth-century American authors. Thus the course will afford an introductory study of varieties of symbolism in the literature of the United States.

CRN	14135	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LIT 259
Title	Literature of the U.S. III
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 120

Cross-listed: American Studies

In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by working out the relationship between a series of literary movements—realism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism—and a series of epochal historical events: among them, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the corporation, the Indian Wars, imperialism, the “New Woman,” new technologies, the birth of modern consumerism, the trauma of World War I, anxiety over immigration, and the various hedonisms of the so-called “Jazz Age.” While writing (and rewriting) this macro-narrative with our left hands, we will be writing a micro-narrative with our right hands, in which we attend not to vast social panoramas but to the moment-to-moment unfolding of each writer’s art. Authors include Twain, Crane, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Millay, and Faulkner.