Course

LIT 3011   The Harlem Renaissance

Professor

Mat Johnson

CRN

15178

 

Schedule

Wed             1:30  -3:50 pm      OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

Cross listed:  American Studies, Gender Studies, SRE

This course will examine the “re-birth” of African-American artistic expression that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. We will focus primarily on the literature – mainly poetry and prose fiction- as well as the nonfiction essays that often responded to and influenced the literature. We will examine literary works in their socio-cultural context and as they relate to the music and visual art of the period. A dual goal of the course is to chronicle the birth of a national consciousness that spawned the larger New Negro Movement and to note the specific role Harlem played in the artistic renaissance. Primary authors may include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown. We will draw on the critical voices of David Levering Lewis, Gloria Hull and Houston Baker as we interrogate the meaning of race and gender during the period.

 

Course

LIT 3031   Hegel’s Legacies in Twentieth-Century French Literature

Professor

Eric Trudel

CRN

15161

 

Schedule

Tu Th          3:00  -4:20 pm      OLIN 305

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: French Studies

It seems difficult to overestimate the importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Twentieth-Century French thought, especially as it is understood and interpreted by Alexandre Kojčve in the “anthropological” commentary he elaborates between 1933 and 1939 in a series of lectures given at the École pratique des hautes études (subsequently published in 1947 as the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel). Kojčve’s insistance on the Master/Slave dialectic, and his emphasis on excess, risk, violence and death had a profound influence on an entire generation of thinkers. We will travel between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Kojčve’s particular take on it. The goal of this course is to follow the development and fortune of this “interminable explication with Hegel” (Derrida) through such hegelian key concepts as negativity, consciousness, history, non-knowledge, desire, work and play. We will read from the theoretical essays, manifestoes and works of fiction of writers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Breton, Caillois, Klossowski, Leiris, Paulhan, Ponge, Queneau and Sartre. All readings in translation. Students with good knowledge of French will have the option of reading these texts in the original French.

 

Course

LIT 3070   Medieval Human Rights

Professor

Karen Sullivan

CRN

15070

 

Schedule

Fr                1:30  -3:50 pm      LC 118

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed:   Human Rights, Medieval Studies

Anyone who has encountered the media’s constant references to Afghanistan’s Taliban as “medieval” knows that the Middle Ages represents a time of religious fanaticism, intellectual obscurantism, and rampant violence. The “medieval,” more than any other category, continues to be used as the other against which modern society defines itself, and the Enlightenment, which popularized the concept of the rights of man, continues to perceived as the barrier protecting us against a barbaric and oppressive past. Yet is it fair to assume that just because a society had no notion of human rights, as we understand them, that there were no human rights? To what extent did medieval political concepts, such as the just war, feudalism, or chivalry, provide protections similar to those that we enjoy today under different terms? In this course we will read a series of classic medieval texts, such as Augustine's City of God, Aquinas's Summa Theologica, troubadour poetry, The Song of Roland, The Death of King Arthur, Egil's Saga, and the chronicles of Vlad the Impaler,  in conjunction with some modern theoretical  writings.

 

Course

LIT 3080   Other Traditions:  “Avant-garde” Poetry and Poetics from the Romantic to the Postmodern Era

Professor

Cole Heinowitz

CRN

15174

 

Schedule

Tu               4:00  -6:20 pm      OLIN 303

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, romantic poetry “emphasizes the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the spontaneous, and the transcendental.” Or does it? Since John Ashbery’s study, Other Traditions, scholars of the nineteenth-century have come to recognize that romantic poetry is not only about what Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” During the romantic era, non-canonical authors such as Thomas Beddoes, John Clare, Mary Robinson, and many others were writing poetry that challenged normative assumptions about what a poem should be, topically, formally, and expressively.  In this course we will study this “other tradition” of romantic poetry by reading it in the context of current “experimental” poetry and poetics, including such works as Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, Lyn Hejinian’s Happiness, Barrett Watten’s 1-10, and Jack Spicer’s Vancouver lectures. Central questions organizing the course will be: What makes a poem “avant-garde” or “experimental”? What are the connections between politics and poetics? What role do readership and market forces play in canon formation? And, perhaps most importantly, what is the legacy of romantic poetry in contemporary postmodern literature? Upper-College standing assumed.

 

Course

LIT 3104   Modern Tragedy

Professor

Benjamin La Farge

CRN

15163

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:30  -2:50 pm      OLIN 309

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

All tragedies see the human condition as doomed; but in classical Greek tragedy the protagonist's fate, usually signified by an oracle or omen, is externalized as something beyond human control, whereas in modern tragedy, starting with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw in the protagonist's character. Since then the modern protagonist has increasingly been seen as a helpless victim of circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is sometimes externalized as history, war, or society, sometimes internalized, but in either case the protagonist has been reduced in stature, so that 20th century tragedy can only be called ironic--a far cry from the heroic tragedy of ancient Greece. In tracing this complex history, including the disappearance and revival of the chorus, we will examine tragedies by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Buchner, Dostoyevsky (his novel Crime and Punishment), Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller, all of which will be scrutinized in the light of the major theories by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others.

 

Course

LIT 333   New Directions-Contemporary  Fiction

Professor

Bradford Morrow

CRN

15344

 

Schedule

Mon             1:30  -3:50 pm      OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: A/B

NEW: Literature in English

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

 

Course

LIT 3362   The Essay

Professor

Luc Sante

CRN

15351

 

Schedule

Th               1:30  -3:50 pm      OLIN 304

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

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.

 

Course

SPAN / LIT  340   Cervantes' Don Quixote

Professor

Gabriela Carrion

CRN

15187

 

Schedule

Tu Th          3:00  -4:20 pm      Olin L.C. 210

Distribution

OLD: B/D

NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

Cross-listed:  LAIS

This course examines the role of difference in Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.  In this “first modern novel” conflict erupts when an old man, moved by his readings of chivalric literature, pronounces himself a knight in shining armor to rescue those in need.  Believing in evil enchanters, Don Quijote and his rotund alter ego, Sancho Panza, set out to rectify the wrongs of the world. However, Don Quijote takes up this mission when knighthood has long ceased to be a social reality in sixteenth-century Spain.  Difference and conformity thus become critical issues at every turn of this novel.  What are the ideological forces that compel conformity in Don Quijote?  How are language and violence posited as instruments of change?  How does literature change its readers and, alternatively, how do readers change literature?  Apart from Don Quijote readings will include Lazarillo de Tormes, Amadis of Gaul, and El abencerraje, among others.  Students may read the texts either in English or in the original Spanish.  Conducted in English.

 

Course

LIT 3401   Poetry and  Politics in Ireland

Professor

Terence Dewsnap

CRN

15081

 

Schedule

Wed             10:30  - 12:50 pm  OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

Cross listed:  Irish and Celtic Studies

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets such as James Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, W. B. Yeats and Austin Clarke recreated images of a Celtic past that served the cause of Irish nationalism. We will study their poetry; also militant songs and ballads from the late eighteenth century to the present, some anonymous, some by prominent patriots like Thomas Davis and Padraic Pearse; also problem poems by poets Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney dealing with contemporaneous events and issues. We will pay some attention to diaries and memoirs illuminating specific moments in Irish history from 1798 to the present. 

 

Course

LIT 343   The Way We Live Now: Social Criticism in the Victorian Novel

Professor

Deirdre d'Albertis

CRN

15149

 

Schedule

Th               10:30  - 12:50 pm  OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed:  Victorian Studies

In 1890 Oscar Wilde wrote: “The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.”  Yet uncomfortable reflection was the desired end for many mid-century novelists.  In this seminar we will examine four realist novels dedicated to forcing upon the consciousness of Victorian middle class readers certain consequences of their naively triumphal account of a uniquely British “world order.”  In writing “the way we live now,” techniques of narration came under special strain; for each of our four writers, ethical engagement and satiric detachment presented often mutually exclusive strategies of representation. Exemplary trials in uber-realism, these “total novels” aspired to do nothing less than embody the social organism as a whole. How did contemporary discourse on empire, the natural sciences, and speculative finance, for instance, inflect these fictional accounts?  From W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) and Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864) to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), we will consider how attempts to anatomize and criticize contemporary manners and morals, society and politics led directly to experimentation in the form of sprawling multi-plot narratives.  So too, we will think about how British cultural formation in this period borrowed on the literary imagination of nineteenth-century novels.  Upper College standing assumed.

 

Course

LIT 422  Writers Workshop for Non-Majors

Professor

Robert Kelly

CRN

15471

 

Schedule

Tu               1:30  -3:50 pm      OLIN 101

Distribution

OLD: B/F

NEW: Practicing Arts

A course designed for juniors and seniors, preference to seniors,  who are not writing majors, but who might wish to see what they can learn about the world through the act of writing. Every craft, science, skill, discipline can be articulated, and anybody who can do real work in science or scholarship or art can learn to write, as they say, "creatively"--that is, learn how to make what concerns them also interest other people by means of language. This course will give not more than a dozen students the chance to experiment with all kinds of writing. Poetry is the name of an activity, and that activity will sometimes produce objects called poems and sometimes other sorts of texts. Towards all resultant texts our attention will turn. This is not a course in self-expression, but in making new things. No portfolio is required but prospective students must consult with Prof. Kelly prior to registration.