(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.