Course	LIT 2011 Aesthetics of Narrative
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	18029
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 310
Distribution	Literature in English

A study of varieties of modern narrative and the aesthetic questions that shape our attention and involvement. How does a narrative reflect its own telling and give us signs as to where to find—or lose—the author? How does it create sympathy with a self-absorbed teller, or use detachment to alarm us? How have minority authors, especially African-Americans, altered narrative traditions? How does literary narrative differ from film narrative? Fictions to be read include Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and the new first novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Film adaptations of Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, and of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, will be screened. Some theory of narrative will be included. Each week a critical, creative, or theoretical response is due. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2013 The Novel in English I
Professor	Deirdre d'Albertis
CRN	18036
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 301
Distribution	Literature in English

In this course (one of a two-part sequence) we will examine “the rise of the novel,” to recall Ian Watt’s influential study, in the specific context of British literary culture.  The eighteenth century origins of gothic, historical, epistolary, domestic, and romantic fiction will be our main concern. How was the dominant tradition of nineteenth-century realism forged out of such diverse beginnings? What has been suppressed in this particular genealogy of the novel in English? Central texts include: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Austen’s Emma (1816),and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Readings on the history of the novel (Michael McKeon, Deidre Lynch, William Warner) will supplement our work with the texts themselves. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2023 The Gift of Literature
Professor	Robert Weston
CRN	18107
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm Olin 303
Distribution	Literature in English

In his ground-breaking work, The Gift, anthropologist Marcel Mauss called the exchange of gifts a “total social phenomenon,” an archaic mode of economic intercourse found universally in human cultures. This ubiquity of the gift is no less characteristic of literature; figures of the gift and corollary notions of generosity, obligation, reciprocity and sacrifice have long captured the literary imagination. In recent years, the theory of the gift has been approached from philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and poststructuralist perspectives which have embraced the gift as an alternative model to the prevailing economics of scarcity and self-interest. In this course we will draw on contemporary discussions of the gift to construct a theoretical model for analyzing literary representations of financial, moral, aesthetic, and libidinal exchange. Readings will include theoretical texts by Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Sahlins, Benveniste, Derrida and Bourdieu, alongside literary works by Shakespeare, Defoe, Wordsworth, Goethe, Eliot, Emerson, Nietzsche and James. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2061 Arab American Literature
Professor	Youssef Yacoubi
CRN	18108
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 – 10:20 am Olin 303
Distribution	Literature in English/ Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies

Surveying over one hundred years of Arab-American literature, thought, art and film, this course will examine important moments in the formation and consolidation of cultural connections between the United States and the Arab world. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the early and later works of influential Arab-American thinkers, writers, artists and public intellectuals. We will explore issues of intertextuality; stylistic appropriations of romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, post-modernism, and themes related to diasporic expression, cultural metamorphosis and imaginative portrayals of Arab-Americans before and after the event of “9/11”. Major writers will include Gibran Khalil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Nuayma, Samuel John Hazo, Etel Adnan, Abinader Elmaz and Edward Said. Our analysis and discussions will be informed by the recent developments in critical/ literary theories and cultural studies. The course will be organized around four themes/ topics: Representations of the Middle East in Early American literature; Key pioneers of Arab-American exchange; Forms and modes of inscribing Arabness/ Muslimness, diaspora and worldliness; pre and post “9/11” images and imaginings.

On-line registration

Course	LIT 210 Modern American Poets
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
CRN	18043
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm Olin 309
Distribution	Literature in English

The triumph of the first great Modernist pioneers in English (Yeats, Pound, Eliot et al.) created a schism in American poetry, dividing poets and their readers into distinctive camps, which may be loosely characterized as “Mandarin” and “Demotic,” Soon a Modernist canon emerged, synonymous with the Mandarins, and it is now generally accepted that the greatest of these, in addition to the pioneers, are Wallace Stevens, who experimented with a poetry of linguistic event and philosophic meditation; Marianne Moore, whose esthetic meditations in syllabic verse helped to move poetic discourse towards prose; and William Carlos Williams, who straddled both camps, experimenting with new kinds of rhythm closer to American speech. All three share a concern with visual art, and many of their best poems prefigure a fixation on painting, film, and photography in American poetry today. Beginning with Stevens, Moore, and Williams, we will trace the Mandarin tradition through Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, and Sylvia Plath; the Demotic tradition, though Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg (another straddler), Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Bob Dylan. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2139 African-American Tradition II
Professor	Charles Walls
CRN	18055
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm Olin 101
Distribution	Literature in English/ Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies

Without assuming any prior engagement with African-American literature, this course will extend the discussion of key Harlem Renaissance texts and the subsequent literary reactions and historical markers that have shaped the development of African-American literary tradition(s). Examining neo-slave narratives, poetry, drama, manifestos, and speeches, we will explore, for example, the impact of the Great Depression, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Vietnam War, and the Reagan years on black writing. We will ask how African-American literature tells and retells stories of sexual abuse and trauma, slavery and empowerment, as well as the appropriation of " ancestral arts” and the transatlantic realities that unhinge the notion of blackness itself. Likely writers will include Locke, Schuyler, Thurman, Hughes, Fauset, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, Baraka, Sanchez, Giovanni, Reed, Morrison, Wilson, and Whitehead.

Course	LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	18035
Schedule	Tu 7:00 -9:20 pm Olin 201
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

This 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 of mass 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 223 Cultural Reportage
Professor	Peter Sourian
CRN	18013
Schedule	Tu 4:00 -6:20 pm Preston101
Distribution	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 / RUS 2314 Rise of the Russian Novel
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	18100
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm Olin 307
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-Listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

The novel, itself still a fairly “new” literary form in Europe, was imported into Russia in the nineteenth century, where it happened to coincide with the beginnings of a national literature that in many ways modeled itself on the West but also constantly questioned that modeling. The novel’s generic associations with identity and individuality thus undergo a double twist in the Russian version. But is the Russian novel all suffering and tortured thoughts? What constitutes a specifically “Russian novel”? In this course we will trace its development in nineteenth-century Russian literature with a view toward understanding both its formal features as well as the cultural significance of its appearance in Russia. Using theories of the novel as elaborated by Watt, Bakhtin, Lukacs, and others, we will study its rise from historical, structural, and cultural points of view. Authors to be read include Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Tolstoy. Conducted in English. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2315 Elective Affinities:” Varieties of Influence, Connection and Correspondence in Classic Works of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Russian and American Literature.
Professor	Elizabeth Frank / Kirill Postoutenko
CRN	18101
Schedule	Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am HDR 302 Th 9:00 - 10:20 am HDR 302
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies, Russian & Eurasian Studies

The past two hundred years have seen the coming-of-age of two great national literatures: Russian and American. Both traditions simultaneously explore those situations, problems and terms that give rise to literary modernism. Assuming that matters of influence, connection and correspondence between nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian and American literature are neither accidental nor arbitrary, but deeply embedded in social, political and cultural contexts, respectively, that often mirror each other, we will examine pairs of Russian and American works and authors whose relationship to each other illuminates a number of important critical issues: for example, the “little” man in a monolithic social system; the rise of the industrial city and urban experience; crises of identity, consciousness and selfhood (and the question of the “double”); the possibility and the loss of spiritual and religious consolations in an increasingly secular world. Authors include but are not limited to Pushkin and Washington Irving; Gogol, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Melville; Vladimir Nabokov (in relation to himself); Tolstoy and Philip Roth. Class discussion will be supplemented by readings in the theory of literary influence and correspondence. The course will meet twice weekly. In the first session of the week, each instructor will meet with his or her group of students alone; in the second (Thursday) session, both of the instructors and the two groups of students meet together for class discussion using Virtual Campus videoconferencing technology. Both Russian and American students will write a number of short papers and all students will do a midterm exam; American students will write a 10-12 pp. term paper and Russian students will have a final. On-line registration

Course	LIT 234 Literature of the Crusades
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	18053
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 -5:20 pm Aspinwall 302
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listing: Human Rights, Medieval Studies

Related interest: Middle Eastern Studies

In November of 1095, on a field outside Clermont, France, Pope Urban II, long frustrated by the internecine warfare between Christian barons, urged an assembled council, “Let them turn their weapons dripping with the blood of their brothers against the enemy of the Christian faith .... Let them hasten, if they love their souls, under their captain Christ to the rescue of Sion.” A great shout of “God wills it” arose from the crowd around him. For much of the following two centuries, Christians departed in large battalions to attempt to gain possession of the Holy Lands, now under Muslim control, and, for many centuries thereafter, they dreamed of reviving such a quest. In this course, we will be studying the considerable literature produced around the Crusades, which includes epics, lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons, in an attempt to understand the mentality that inspired lords and peasants, knights and monks, men and women, and adults and children to take up the cross. While we will be considering primarily the Catholic perspective, attention will also be paid to the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish points of view on these conflicts. What happens when religion goes to war, when eschatology meets history, and when the celestial Jerusalem becomes identified with the earthly Jerusalem? Insofar as, for much of the Middle East, the Crusades continue to provide a principal model of the encounter between West and East, what exactly is implied by this paradigm? On-line registration

Course	LIT 2430 Quarrel of Reason and Faith
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	18104
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 101
Distribution	Literature in English / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Theology

What does it mean to say ‘I believe,’ as opposed to ‘I think’? Is it possible to be both a rational person and a believer in God? Why have so many people throughout history felt there to be a conflict between reason and faith? Why have so many other people denied that there exists such a conflict? What common ground exists between reason- and faith-based discourses? Why has this common ground become increasingly contested in recent years? We will attempt to answer these questions through close readings of several classic texts, primarily from the Christian and post-Christian traditions, including works by Augustine, Anselm, Peter Abelard, Averroës, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Benedict XVI, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. On-line registration

Course	LIT 246 African Women Writers
Professor	Chinua Achebe
CRN	18033
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm Olin 101
Distribution	Literature in English/ Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Studies in Race and Ethnicity

The dramatic emergence of modern African literature midway through the twentieth century was quickly amplified within a decade by the distinct voices of a remarkable band of women writers whose work is now established as a significant part of Africa’s revolutionary literature. The course will study novels and short stories by some of the leading practitioners from the 1960s to the present, in English originals or translations from French and Arabic. Among the writers to be considered are Flora Nwapa, Marianna Ba, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Alifa Rifaat, Bessie Head, and Ama Ata Aidoo. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2482 Narratives of Suffering
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	18051
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 201
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights

The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the heart of many of the world’s great stories and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of one’s life?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirtsleeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers’ stories. Why? Our investigations will begin at this point. Texts will include the book of Job, King Lear, Moby-Dick, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, The Sound and the Fury, Beloved, Maus, and The Road. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2501 Shakespeare
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	18050
Schedule	Wed Fr 1:30 -2:50 pm Olin 102
Distribution	Literature in English

The core of the course will be the close reading of nine plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV part I, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. This will be both rich and insufficient—ideally, the reading list would be longer and we would actually go to the plays—but as Shakespeare himself will tell us, nothing is ever sufficient. We will supplement the reading experience with critical essays and in-class performances of scenes, in an effort to go toward what Shakespeare gives us. We will not be able to help drawing him toward our language, our culture, our moment in history, but we will do everything we can to move in the other direction as well. No Prerequisites. Requirements: three papers, two in-class performances, and pre-class postings on a web forum. On-line registration

Course	LIT / RUS 2701 Generation "P" The Invention of the 21st Century
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	18110
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm Olin 306
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian Studies

Generation "P" is a term coined by Viktor Pelevin, one of the most provocative Russian writers today. Does "P" stand for postmodern, post-Soviet, Pelevin, Putin, or just for pun? We are going to examine all kind of "p"ossibilities and "p"aradoxes in the works of Pelevin and other authors, including Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Erofeev, Evgenii Kharitonov, Valeriia Narbikova, Dmitrii Prigov, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatiana Tolstaia, and critical theorists Boris Groys and Mikhail Epstein. Significant attention will be paid to the debate on the "postmodern condition" in Russian culture. Along with literary texts we shall examine some films and music by Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina. Conducted in English.

Course	LIT 2733 Ten Plays that Shook the World
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	18103
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 305
Distribution	Literature in English

The plays analyzed and discussed in this course are considered milestones in the history of theatre for their innovative use of language, form, thematic treatment, and the insight they provide into the human soul. They all evidence the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional boundaries of viewers, making us reflect on the nature of love, ambition, loneliness, self-righteousness, and deal in the final analysis with universalities of the human condition. We begin in the Classical period, reading Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripedes’ The Trojan Woman. From there we move on to the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Goethe’s Faust. Continuing along the axis of a pan-European Modernism, we read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Ibsen’s Doll House, and Strindberg’s Dance of Death. And finally, we examine the more radical currents in Brecht’s Mother Courage, Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Class discussions are supplemented by selections of significant moments in filmed or taped performances.

Course	LIT 290 History of English Language
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	18045
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 - 10:20 am Olin 201
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

An introduction both to the facts about the evolution of our common language during the last thousand years or so and to the ways in which linguistic changes can be discovered, described, explained, assessed, and grouped. On-line registration