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.