Course |
LIT 2003 Modern Satire |
|
Professor |
Terence Dewsnap |
|
CRN |
15080 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 1:30
-2:50 pm OLIN 203 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
A
seminar on twentieth-century satiric writing and its context. Writers include Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh,
Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy and David
Lodge. Students may experiment with
satiric forms in two of their three papers.
Prerequisite:
Some familiarity with the traditions of satire (for example Lit 240 Satire).
Course |
LIT 209 / GER 309 Goethe's Faust: Sympathy for the Devil? |
|
Professor |
Franz Kempf |
|
CRN |
15115 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:00 - 11:20 am Olin L.C. 120 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: D
|
NEW: Foreign
Language, Literature, & Culture
|
An intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in
league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the
world and experience of life and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of
this striving provides the basis for our analysis of the play's central themes,
individuality, knowledge and transcendence, in regard to their meaning in
Goethe's time and their relevance for our time. To gain a fuller appreciation
of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, we will
also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the
integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (e.g. Arrigo Boito's opera
Mefistofele, Friendrich W. Murnau's film Faust). Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in
German are encouraged to read Faust in the original
Course |
LIT 2107 Byzantium |
|
Professor |
Karen Sullivan |
|
CRN |
15069 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 3:00 -4:20 pm ASP 302 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/D
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed:
Medieval Studies
Related
interest: Italian Studies
This course considers the culture and, especially,
the literature of Byzantium, from the city's founding in AD 330 to its fall to
the Turks in 1453. We will be studying
writings by the Greek Church Fathers, chronicles on the Byzantines by Greeks,
Muslims, and westerners, and treatments of such important historical events as
the iconoclast controversy and the Crusades, in addition to the principal works
of medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry from this region. While our focus will be upon the city
nowadays known as Istanbul and its surrounding territories, we will also be
examining the Byzantine presence in the Balkans and parts of Italy, Russia, and
northern Africa. We will end by
contemplating the influence of what W. B. Yeats calls "the holy city of
Byzantium" upon later civilizations.
Course |
LIT 2158 Modernist Poetry and Painting |
|
Professor |
Karin Roffman |
|
CRN |
15182 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 1:30
-2:50 pm OLIN 309 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Wallace Stevens famously argued that “the poet…is
in rapport with the painter.” This
course will consider ekphrastic works (for example, how poets such as Auden,
Williams, and Stevens described paintings), but also how ideas about poetry and
painting influenced each other in the first few decades of the twentieth
century. We will study artistic “isms”
such as Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism
and consider their literary counterparts.
We will also revisit the spaces that inspired discussions, essays, and
poems about the relationship between poetry and painting, places such as
Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, the 135th Street Library, and the important
armory shows and exhibitions between 1910 and 1920. Writers and painters studied will include: Gwendolyn Bennett,
Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, H.D., Aaron Douglas, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg,
Wyndham Lewis, Stéphane Mallarmé, John Marin, F.T. Marinetti, Marianne Moore,
Georgia O’Keefe, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Alfred
Stieglitz, Paul Valéry, and William Carlos Williams.
Course |
LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule |
|
Professor |
Jonathan Brent |
|
CRN |
15381 |
|
Schedule |
Th 7:00 – 9:20 pm OLIN 201 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: Russian and
Eurasian Studies
This
course will examine the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the
time of the Revolution to the stagnation of the Brezhnev period. We will look at the majestic, triumphant
imaginative liberation in writers such as Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the Terror
of the 1930s in Yuri Olesha, Anna Akhmatova, Lidia Chukovskaya, Mikhail
Zoshchenko, Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pilnyak and Yuri Tynyanov; the hesitant Thaw
as reflected in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; and the course will
conclude by reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich and Moscow to the End
of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev. Readings of literary works will be
supplemented with political and historical documents to provide a sense of the
larger political-social-historical context in which they were written. After
the violent, imaginative ebullience of the Revolutionary period, how did
literature stay alive during the darkest period of mass repression, censorship
and terror when millions of Soviet citizens were either imprisoned or
shot? What formal/aesthetic choices did
these writers make in negotiating the demands of official ideology and Party
discipline, on the one hand, and authentic literary expression, on the other? What image of history and of man did these
“Engineers of human souls” produce?
These are some of the questions we will ask and seek to answer. All readings will be in English.
Course |
LIT 223 Cultural Reportage |
|
Professor |
Peter Sourian |
|
CRN |
15273 |
|
Schedule |
Tu 4:00 -6:20 pm OLIN 309 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/F
|
NEW: Practicing
Arts
|
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.
Course |
LIT 2307 Rewriting Conquest: Latin America and the Anglo-American Imagination |
|
Professor |
Cole Heinowitz |
|
CRN |
15175 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 3:00
-4:20 pm OLIN 310 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: LAIS
Ever
since its “discovery” in 1492, Latin America has been (re)produced for European
audiences as literature, art, history, and even science. The Spanish
conquistadors created dazzling prospects of America that at once stoked the
imagination and whetted colonialist ambitions. With the crumbling of the
Iberian empires, the republics of Latin America were thrown open to British and
North American entrepreneurs, scientists, and adventurers who struggled to
define Anglo-imperialism as somehow different from its Iberian antecedents. In
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Latin America attracts such diverse
chroniclers as Beat poets, ecotourists, radical Marxists, and multinational
CEOs. In this course we will examine the various reasons why Latin America has
been and remains such a powerful object of artistic and political attention.
Historical readings will include selections from Columbus’s Four Voyages, Díaz’s Conquest of New Spain, Robertson’s History of America, Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and Todorov’s
Conquest of America. Other readings
may include Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life
in Mexico, Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s
Daughter, Doyle’s The Lost World,
William Carlos Williams’s In the American
Grain, Burroughs and Ginsberg’s The
Yage Letters, and Alejo Carpentier’s The
Harp and the Shadow. Film screening may include Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and Echevarría’s Cabeza
de Vaca.
Course |
LIT 2308 Modern American Drama |
|
Professor |
Karin Roffman |
|
CRN |
15183 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 3:00
-4:20 pm OLIN 203 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed:
Theater
This course introduces important American plays
from about 1914 to 1955 and also examines the relationship between modernism
and the theater, including how European expressions of modernism influenced
American playwrights. Playwrights
studied will include: Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, Mina Loy, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Frank O’Hara,
Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams.
Course |
LIT 2331 American Gothic |
|
Professor |
Donna Grover |
|
CRN |
15171 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 10:00 – 11:20 am OLIN 305 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
The
gothic novel is considered to be the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses
and heroines in distress. Its use of
melodrama and the macabre often disguise the psychological, sexual, and
emotional issues that are in fact more horrifying than the contents of a
haunted house. The gothic novel in
America has often confronted topics pertinent to American identity and
history. In this course we will examine
how many American authors used the gothic genre to actually engage with social,
political and cultural concerns. We
will read novels and short stories that span the 19th and 20th
century by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Edith
Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson and James Baldwin.
Course |
LIT 2372 Race and the American Novel |
|
Professor |
Mat Johnson |
|
CRN |
15177 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 11:30 - 12:50 pm OLIN 205 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English/ Rethinking Difference
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies
In her influential collection of critical lectures,
Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison asks, "How is 'literary
whiteness' and 'literary blackness' made, and what is the consequence of that
construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work
in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be
'humanistic?" This course will
seek to answer those questions, and explore the line further. In a country where authors of European
descent are considered universal writers, while writers of African and
other ancestries are marginalized into ethnic ghettos, what has been the effect
on American literature on the whole?
How was this literary caste system formed, evaluated, maintained? What are "whiteness" and
"blackness", and how have these categories shaped and defined
American literature? These are
questions that go to the heart of American literary identity, and beyond to the
formation of American identity itself.
Using Morrison and other critics as guides, the course will begin its
investigation in the 19th century with Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym, Herman Mellville's "Benito Cereno," Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Mark Twain's Puddn 'head Wilson. On the other end of the ethnic divide,
we'll be examining slave narratives including Frederick Douglass's Narrative,
as well as Africanist fiction such as Frank Webb's The Garies and Their
Friends and the stories of Charles W. Chestnutt. The course will continue into in the early 20th century with
William Faulkner's Light in August, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Willa
Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and
Have Not, and end with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
Course |
LIT 246 African Women Writers |
|
Professor |
Chinua Achebe |
|
CRN |
15382 |
|
Schedule |
Wed 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 101 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, 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.
Course |
LIT 2501 Shakespeare’s Comedies |
|
Professor |
Mark Lambert |
|
CRN |
15180 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:00 - 11:20 am OLIN 202 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
This course will start with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, the four
delightful plays which are for most of us the central, essential, normative
Shakespearean comedies. From there we will move to variously different and
sometimes disturbing dramas (The Merchant
of Venice, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry IV, Part
I ) as we consider the developing meanings and values of comedy and the
comic in Shakespeare’s work. Open to all students.
Course |
LIT 2650 Irish Fiction |
|
Professor |
Benjamin La Farge |
|
CRN |
15162 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 10:00
- 11:20 am OLIN 309 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B
|
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: Irish &
Celtic Studies
Irish fiction of the modern period--the stories,
novels, and plays of the past 300 years--has been divided between two
traditions: the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers who were English by descent
but deeply identified with Ireland; and the Catholic tradition of modern
Ireland. From the first we will read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, together with plays by J.M. Synge,
W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, and additional fiction by Eizabeth Bowen, William
Trevor, et al. From the second, we will read Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, Flann O'Brien's At
Swim-Two-Birds, and additional fiction by Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty
and many others. As background we will also read a brief history of Ireland
during this period.