Course |
LIT 204A Comparative Literature I: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance/ The Birth of the Author |
|
Professor |
Karen Sullivan |
|
CRN |
17399 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:30- 11:50 am Olin 101 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/C |
NEW: Literature
in English
|
Cross-listed: 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 Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Dante Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, and the
writings of the poet-thief Villon and the renegade monk Rabelais. On-line
registration
Course |
LIT 204C Comparative Literature III |
|
Professor |
Eric Trudel |
|
CRN |
17402 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 9:00- 10:20 am Olin 205 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW:
Literature in English
|
This course examines the peculiar
and perplexing Euro-American literary transformation loosely named Romanticism
to Modernity. Reading selected texts by a limited number of authors very
carefully, we will emphasize the relation between the self and others, as it
happens in language: what is it to meet others in words? How do actions and
obligations emerge and change out of encounters in language? How does what we
think or know get linked with what we do, if it does? And how does language
sustain or bear with non-human others: ideas, the dead, memories, and so on?
Readings from Apollinaire, Balzac, Baudelaire, Büchner, Chekhov, Eliot,
Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Hofmannsthal, James, Mallarmé, Novalis,
Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde and Woolf. On-line registration
Course |
LIT 250 English Literature I |
|
Professor |
Benjamin La Farge |
|
CRN |
17094 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 10:30- 11:50 am Olin 309 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW:
Literature in English
|
Cross-Listed: Medieval Studies
An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance
English literature which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the
development of a critical vocabulary and imagination, and the discovery of some
of the classic works which make up English literature from Beowulf and Chaucer to the major Elizabethans. Among the topics we
will explore are the construction of the author (from "Anonymous" to
Shakespeare), the British "nation"(imagined and partly created by the
literature), and the urban, rural, monastic, and theatrical levels of society
which literature sought to represent. Authors studied include the Beowulf poet,
the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser,
Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, among others. The course
is for new and continuing literature majors who want to explore the range and
depth of English literature while they fulfill program requirements. On-line registration
Course |
LIT 252 English Literature III |
|
Professor |
Cole Heinowitz |
|
CRN |
17379 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 2:30-3:50 pm Olin 205 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/C |
NEW:
Literature in English
|
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
English Literature
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Blake and Shelley’s poetry and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to
modernist writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Some
attention to contemporary and to colonial and postcolonial writers in
English. On-line registration
Course |
LIT 258 Literature of the U.S. II |
|
Professor |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
|
CRN |
17380 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 10:30- 11:50 am Olin 203 |
|
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 registration
Course |
LIT 260 Literature
of the U. S. IV: December 7,
1941-September 11, 2001: "Where do we find ourselves?"
("Experience," R.W.
Emerson) |
|
Professor |
Elizabeth Frank |
|
CRN |
17092 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Th 10:30- 11:50 am Aspinwall 302 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW:
Literature in English
|
Cross-listed: American Studies
In the wake of World War II, the United
States emerged as the world’s dominant military, economic, and cultural power. That
power, diffused into the lives of individual Americans by technological,
political, and social change, simultaneously deepened a sense of powerlessness
and held out a promise of power-by-proxy: if you imaginatively identify with
the nation and its privileged symbols—things like whiteness, masculinity,
weaponry, and happiness—you will experience a renewed sense of centrality and
significance. In this course, we will be testing the proposition that
literature offers an alternative to those kinds of power and that kind of
promise. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center of September
11, 2001, we will also assign ourselves the task of asking the question with
which R.W. Emerson begins his essay, "Experience": "Where do we find
ourselves?" by examining works by mid-to late twentieth-century and
contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Moreover we
shall do so through explicit reference to traditions and problems addressed by
the first three courses in the United States literature sequence. Are we still
the "City on a Hill"? Have we fulfilled the promise voiced by the
democratic faith of Emerson and Whitman? Do we possess a "usable
past"? Is ours a society marked by "quiet desperation"?
With these and other questions in mind, we will read a diverse selection of
authors that will include Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Tennessee
Williams, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, Philip Roth, Tim O'Brien, Raymond
Carver, Sandra Cisneros and others as time permits. Prerequisite: US Literature
IV may be used to satisfy the literature program’s moderation requirement if and only if the student has already
taken US Lit I or US Lit II. You will not be permitted to moderate if
you have only taken US Lit III and US Lit IV. The course will, however, be open
to already-moderated students and students who do not plan to moderate into the
literature program. On-line registration