COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:

Course	CLAS / LIT 219 Comparative Literature / Ancient Lyric: Translations and Imitations
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	16063
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 203
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

A course in English in which the great lyric poetry of Sappho, Pindar, Catullus and Horace will be studied through the many centuries of translations and imitations of them by British and American writers. We will look at metrical and linguistic maps of the original, range widely in comparing translations of a few key poems, and study the many kinds of imitation they generated. Students with foreign languages, not only Greek and Latin but also Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian or any of the others into which these poets have been translated, will be encouraged to bring their knowledge to bear. On-line

Course	LIT 204A Comparative Literature I: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: The Birth of the Author
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	16002
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 -5:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-List: Medieval Studies

When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? While these questions continue to divide literary critics today, with some emphasizing the social origins and others the individual origins of such works, these issues are of particular interest to readers of medieval and Renaissance literature, as it was during this time period that the notion of the author, as we conceive of it today, first developed. In this course, we will be considering the shift from saga and epic to lyric and romance; from orally-based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Saga of the Volsungs, The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Francesco Petrarca’s sonnets, and the writings of the poet-thief François Villon and the renegade monk François Rabelais. On-line

ENGLISH LITERATURE:

Course	LIT 251 English Literature II
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	16132
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 307
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

This course explores the dynamic history of English literature from 1603 to 1786, from the metaphysical poetry of John Donne to the gothic novels of William Beckford and Horace Walpole, and from the era of the great religious wars to the establishment of Great Britain as a modern imperial nation. Along the way, we will investigate such events as the Puritan Revolt of 1640-60, the so-called “Glorious” Revolution of 1688, the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the Gordon Riots of 1780. We will study the momentous shift that occurred from a culture of courtly patronage to a more public, inclusive, and mercantile culture. We will also examine how the seventeenth century’s preoccupation with the struggle between God and Satan (staged in the pages of Milton’s Paradise Lost) gave way to the eighteenth century’s toleration of diverse religious perspectives. As the eighteenth century approached, greater emphasis was placed on the secular realm, and sentimentality took the place of skepticism. As we track these changes, we will explore the range of genres produced in this period (lyric, epic, blank verse, the masque, the revenge play, the comedy of manners, the essay, the novel—to name a few), developing students’ interpretive abilities through the rigorous close reading of literary texts . Readings will include the poetry of John Donne, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and William Cowper, the plays of Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and William Congreve, and the novels of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. On-line

U.S. LITERATURE:

Course	LIT 258 Literature of the U.S. II: American Renaissance
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
CRN	16072
Schedule	Wed Th 10:30 - 11:50 am ASP 302
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, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. On-line

Course	LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	16173
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by working out the relationship between a series of literary movements—realism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism—and a series of epochal historical events: among them, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the corporation, the Indian Wars, imperialism, the “New Woman,” new technologies, the birth of modern consumerism, the trauma of World War I, anxiety over immigration, and the various hedonisms of the so-called “Jazz Age.” While writing (and rewriting) this macro-narrative with our left hands, we will be writing a micro-narrative with our right hands, in which we attend not to vast social panoramas but to the moment-to-moment unfolding of each writer’s art. Authors include Twain, Crane, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Millay, and Faulkner. On-line