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.