Course	LIT 2151 St. Petersburg: City as Text
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	17385
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30-2:50 pm Preston 128
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

The magical and terrible spaces of St. Petersburg have inspired Russian writers and artists as well as confounded the Russian quest for an integral national identity ever since Peter the Great founded the city in 1703. This course examines the "myth" of St. Petersburg in Russian literature and culture with consideration not only of how the city has been constructed as a literary, artistic, and folkloric text, but of how the city itself has determined the course of Russian culture and Russian selfhood. Special critical attention is given to the nature of the city as a "sign," with appropriate strategies for "reading" the city in a variety of artistic and philosophical mediums. Readings range from the classic Petersburg texts of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to twentieth-century interpretations in prose, poetry, memoirs, film, and carnival performance associated with the city's 300th-year anniversary celebrations. Conducted in English. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	17382
Schedule	Tu 7:00-9:20 pm Olin 202
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian StudiesThis course will examine the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the time of the Revolution to the stagnation of the Brezhnev period. We will look at the majestic, triumphant imaginative liberation in writers such as Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the Terror of the 1930s in Yuri Olesha, Anna Akhmatova, Lidia Chukovskaya, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pilnyak and Yuri Tynyanov; the hesitant Thaw as reflected in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; and the course will conclude by reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev.Readings of literary works will be supplemented with political and historical documents to provide a sense of the larger political-social-historical context in which they were written. After the violent, imaginative ebullience of the Revolutionary period, how did literature stay alive during the darkest period ofmass repression, censorship and terror when millions of Soviet citizens were either imprisoned or shot? What formal/aesthetic choices did these writers make in negotiating the demands of official ideology and Party discipline, on the one hand, and authentic literary expression, on the other? What image of history and of man did these “Engineers of human souls” produce? These are some of the questions we will ask and seek to answer. All readings will be in English. On-line registration

Course	LIT 218 Free Speech
Professor	Thomas Keenan
CRN	17392
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00-1:20 pm Olin 204
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: Humanities

Cross-listed: Human Rights (core course)

An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and torture. The course will examine the ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in ideas about democracy. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do with literature. Why have poetry and fiction always been privileged examples of freedom and its defense? What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? Is an encounter with the fact of language, which belongs to no one and can be appropriated by anyone, at the heart of democracy? In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will ask about the ways in which the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from a 'literary' experience. These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, including case studies and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Spivak, Fish, Agamben). A core course in the Human Rights Program. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2192 Queer Theory
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	17506
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 – 2:20 pm Olin 310
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: Humanities / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies

To engage in queer theory is both to challenge the conventional practices and assumptions of a sexuality-blind discipline or practice, and to enlist a wide variety of languages and forms to shed light on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender culture and history. It is “rethinking difference” in the sexual sphere. If queer theory takes its first point of departure from the feminist studies of the 70s and the 80s, it enlists the traditions of activism, historical narrative, radical critiques of gender and changing attitudes toward intersex individuals to compose a rich variety of sources and angles of vision. We will exclude most identity-focused personal narratives, and seek to refine our understandings of sexuality, gender, and the role of its theorizing within today’s cultural projects. The range of readings will be wide, and students will be expected to take pleasure in the intellectual challenges of coming to terms with it. On-line registration

Course	LIT 223 Cultural Reportage
Professor	Peter Sourian
CRN	17091
Schedule	Tu 4:00-6:20 pm Preston 101
Distribution	OLD: B/F	NEW: Practicing Arts

For the self motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. The course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, but not restricted to majors. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2235 Philosophies of Poetry from Plato to Dada
Professor	Paul Stephens
CRN	17398
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30-3:50 pm Olin 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Like most Enlightenment and Romantic writers on aesthetics, Kant and Hegel considered poetry the highest of all arts. Plato, on the other hand, was famously hostile to poetry and demanded that poets justify themselves before being permitted in the Republic. Poetry and philosophy have often been at odds with one another, and yet Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “philosophy ought only to be written as a form of poetry.” This course explores the place of poetry in culture and in philosophy from classical Greece to the historical avant-garde. We will pose questions about the nature of poetry and poetics as genres, as well as about the nature of literary criticism as it relates to poetry. Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Sidney, Puttenham, Milton, Pope, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Hegel, Blake, Shelley, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Dickinson, Lautréaumont, Marinetti, Pound, Tzara, Loy, Wittgenstein. Students will primarily write critical essays, but there will also be an opportunity at the end of the semester for students to write manifestos and poetic statements of their own.

Course	CLAS / LIT 230 “Like Strangers in Our Own City": Life and Literature in the Late Roman Republic
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	17044
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30-3:50 pm Olin 202
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

The last generations of the Roman Republic experienced widespread social change resulting from dispossessions and the loss of traditional lifeways in Italy, sanctioned exploitation abroad, and increasingly intense and varied cultural contacts throughout an unceasingly expanding empire. Roman authors of the period responded to these “consequences of conquest” by fashioning Latin literary languages in diverse genres including private letters, public speeches, the military diary, epic and lyric poetry, and philosophical prose. This combination of ongoing change and linguistic experimentation brought problems of its own and, for us, raises a set of enduring questions. In general, what is the relationship between language and lived experience? What uses of language, and who among its users, are able to bring about change in politics, the economy, society, or culture? If linguistic acts are classified as official, informal, inappropriate, threatening, dangerous, or obscene, among others, may speech be free? During a time of difficult and urgent questions, who may speak and who must listen? Topics include Latin literary history; late Roman Republican politics, society, and culture; the so-called ‘poverty of the [Latin] language’; linguistic and cultural pluralism, purity, and policy; the diversity of attested Roman lives; the differences between 'plainspoken' and 'figured speech'; and the promises and problems of the 'literary'. Readings, all in English, from Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Lucretius, and Sallust; some of their later biographers, admirers, imitators, and detractors; and modern historiography and literary criticism. No prerequisites; possibility of concurrent Latin tutorial on selected passages from the five principal authors. On-line registration

Course	LIT 231 Florence
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	17400
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00-5:20 pm Aspinwall 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

In 1527 Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, as an aside in a letter about a local political conflict, "I love my country more than my very soul." What was it about Florence, Machiavelli's "country," that brought him to value it more than his immortal being? What was it about Florence of the late medieval, early modern age that not only produced such a feeling, but allowed it to be expressed? The course begins with a reading of Machiavelli's history of Florence and the political treatises that brought him such notoriety. Dante's ambiguous writings about the land from which he was exiled, Coluccio Salutati's vision of civic humanism, and Botticelli's critique of his city's politics in his paintings will be considered, as well as the major intellectual movements that originated in Florence, as reflected by the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, da Vinci, Vasari, and the neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2332 The Gothic Tradition in Romantic Literature
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	17389
Schedule	Tu Th 5:30-6:50 pm Olin 204
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies

In the late 18^th century, the gothic emerged across Europe as a powerful discourse well-suited to the tempestuous politics of the time. This class will explore the phenomenon of the gothic revival in British literature as well as its debts to French and German literary traditions. We will read central gothic novels including Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, Lewis’s The Monk, Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. We will also examine the gothic poetry and drama of the period, reading relevant poems by Coleridge and Keats as well as plays by Shelley and Inchbald. Alongside these British texts, we will study the French and German works with which they were in dialogue, including writings by de Sade, de Staël, Diderot, Goethe, Hoffman, and Schiller. And because the gothic was not only a literary aesthetic phenomenon, we will also examine the impact of the gothic across the disciplines: in aesthetic theory, political commentary on the French Revolution, and moral and political writing on reading practices and the social impact of the gothic. Central themes to be explored and constantly renegotiated in class discussion include the constitution of gender, sublimity and terror, transgression and taboo, sentiment and sensibility, colonialism and orientalism, and the relationship between high and popular culture during the romantic era. On-line registration

Course	LIT 238 Modern African Fiction
Professor	Chinua Achebe
CRN	17381
Schedule	Wed 1:30-3:50 pm Olin 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights, SRE

Related interest: French Studies

The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of modern African literature. This course will introduce this new writing through a few key texts in its fiction. Works written originally in French or Arabic will be read in their English translations. The course will relate the literature, wherever appropriate to Africa's past traditions as well as its contemporary reality. The authors to be studied include Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, Ferdinand Oyono, Amos Tutuola, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tayeb Salih.

Course	LIT 249 Arthurian Romance
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	17394
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00- 10:20 am Olin 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

A study of the variety of concerns, meanings, and pleasures in medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights. Readings in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot, Beroul and Thomas's Romance of Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other works.

Course	LIT 2504 Shakespeare's Comedies
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	17395
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00- 10:20 am Olin 201
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

This course will start with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, the four delightful plays which are for most of us the central, essential, normative Shakespearean comedies. From there we will move to variously different and sometimes disturbing dramas (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry IV, Part I ) as we consider the developing meanings and values of comedy and the comic in Shakespeare’s work. Open to all students.

Course	LIT 2651 The Irish Big House
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	17386
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30- 11:50 am Olin 308
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

This course focuses on twentieth-century fiction and plays. Liam O’Flaherty, Lennox Robinson, Molly Keane, Brendan Behan, and other English and Irish writers have exploited the ironic situation of the Anglo-Irish gentry living in prestigious manors on large estates and wielding great social power amid a majority population with alien codes and beliefs. By concentrating on the symbol of the Big House, the class comes to some understanding of the contrasting ceremonies of life inside and outside the manor. Autobiographical and historical selections document the problems – decadence, alienation, violence – of the Big House under siege. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2670 Women Writing the Caribbean
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	17388
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30- 11:50 am Olin 307
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English/ Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, SRE

The “creolized” culture of the Caribbean has been a hotbed of women’s writing from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes creolization as “nowhere purely African, but … a mosaic of African, European, and indigenous responses to a truly novel reality.” This course is concerned with how women, through fiction, interpreted that reality. While confronting the often explosive politics of post-colonial island life and at the same time navigating the presence of French, English, and African influence, women saw their role as deeply conflicted. We will begin with The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Other writers will include Martha Gelhorn, Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Dandicat. On-line registration

Course	CLAS / LIT 275 Poetry and Athletics
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	17115
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00-2:20 pm Olin 201
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

The meanings to be seen in athletics have stirred the meditations and praises of poets in many different cultures and genres, and sometimes these poems have been wedded to choral dance in contexts in which several choruses are themselves competing “athletically” for a prize. This course will study the strange intersections of the physical, the social and the sacred we still recognize in sports. We will allot equal time to three different sets of readings: 1) Mesoamerican and native American tales of the foundational ball game, with focus on the Mayan Popol Vuh; 2) victory odes for the ancient Greek games, principally those of Pindar, often considered the greatest lyric poet of the West, concerned with boxing, wrestling, running, pentathlon, pancratium, chariot, dithyramb, and paean; 3) two case studies of the wedding of poetry to athletics in Hawaiian culture: a) chants for the royal surfing festivals, and b) traditional hula viewed, like the Greek dithryamb and paean, as a fusion of words, music and dance in a context which under some circumstances can itself be a prize-awarding athletic event for competing choruses. In all three parts we will read not only the poems themselves but also some scholarship by sports and dance historians on the particular forms of movement they reflect. All readings will be in English, and there are no prerequisites. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2882 Different Voices, Different Views
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	17396
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00- 10:20 am Olin 203
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

A close reading of selected plays, poems, and short stories by contemporary authors from North, West, and South Africa, Egypt, India, and China. These works are analyzed for their intrinsic literary merits and the versimilitude with which they portray the social conditions and political problems in the respective countries. We examine the extent to which their writers have been drawing on native traditions or been affected by extraneous artistic trends or belief systems such as Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Democratic Socialism. Authors include Assia Djebar, Sembéne Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nawal Saadawi, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, R. K. Narayan, Mahasveta Devi, and Salman Rushdie.