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

 

Course

LIT 204 CL    Comparative Literature A: Ancient Poetry – Making Words and Worlds

Professor

Benjamin Stevens

CRN

15375

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:00  - 11:20 am  OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: B

NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

 “Poetry” comes from the Greek verb poiein, “to make”. Although the product of ancient poiesis is poetry, the purpose was to make not just words but also worlds. By using poetics in place of physics, as it were, Greek and Roman poetry linked aesthetics to ethics: words to be lived by structured worlds to be lived in. Poetry was the cornerstone of a verbal architecture of real and ideal social space. This course explores how Greek and Roman poetry is always making worlds, literary and other, out of words. Topics considered include the mechanics and conventions of ancient poetry; the historical contexts of the ancient Mediterranean; traditional topoi including myth; poetry in education; the problem of sources and influences; translation, allusion, imitation, and innovation; the roles played by poets, patrons, and audiences; responses to poetry as literary and social criticism; critical and subversive poetics; and textual transmission and the formation of the canon. Close attention is paid to themes, images, and tropes later to reappear throughout Western literature. Readings, all in English translation, include whole works and selections from Greek and Roman poets; ancient literary criticism; and modern criticism of Classical literature.

 

Course

LIT 204A   Comparative  Literature II:

                  The Ancien Regime

Professor

Karen Sullivan

CRN

15117

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:00  - 11:20 am  OLIN 101

Distribution

OLD: B/C

NEW: Literature in English

In the late sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth centuries, continental authors responded to the crises posed by the Protestant Reformation and the Counter‑Reformation, by the establishment of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV at Versailles, and by the alternate models of civic and religious life provided by the New World and other non‑Christian lands. During this time period, authority, whether it be that of the king, the pope, or the father, was justified with a renewed vigor, but it was also challenged to an unprecedented degree, especially in the years leading up to the French Revolution. In novels, essays, plays, aphorisms, and other literary genres, authors thematized the problem of social authority, even as they tested the boundaries of aesthetic authority in doing so. Authors to be read include Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Madame de Lafayette, Molière, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Francisco de Quevedo, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, Edmund Burke, and

Robespierre.

 

Course

LIT 251   English Literature II

Professor

Mark Lambert

CRN

15488

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     10:00  - 11:20 am  OLIN 303

Distribution

OLD: B/C

NEW: Literature in English

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost.. but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values. After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers. Fulfills program requirement as explained in note at beginning of Literature Program courses.

 

Course

LIT 258   Literature of the U.S. II

Professor

Geoffrey Sanborn

CRN

15121

 

Schedule

Wed Fr        10:00  - 11:20 am  OLIN 204

Distribution

OLD: B/C

NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

The contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson has suggested that the central characteristic of the writers of the American Renaissance is “the assumption that the only way to understand the world is metaphorical, that all metaphors are inadequate, and that if you press them hard enough you’re delivered into something that requires a new articulation.” This is as good a way as any of describing what is “born” in American writing between the years 1830 and 1865 (a new articulation), and how it is born (pressing on and being delivered from metaphors). All of the authors we will study are unusually obsessed with the problem of understanding their world and many of them are unusually aware of language’s paradoxical status as the obstructive but necessary medium of that understanding. Robinson observes elsewhere that the project of the American Renaissance “ended before it was completed.” The aim of this course is to restart that project and to move, if only infinitesimally, in the direction of its completion.  Authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

 

Course

LIT 259   Literature of the U.S. III

Professor

Donna Grover

CRN

15172

 

Schedule

Tu  Th    4:30 – 5:50 pm  OLIN 205

Distribution

OLD: B/C

NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

In this course we will study works written between 1865 and 1930—from the post-civil war period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism and emergent modernism.  Authors include Henry James, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Nella Larson, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.