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