(Historical studies in the Comparative, English, and American literature traditions are organized into sequences. Please notify the instructor if you need a sequence course in order to moderate in the spring of 2008.)

Course	LIT 204 Comparative Literature:The Ancient Mediterranean World: Birth of Text, Birth of Reader
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	18015
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 - 10:20 am Olin 203
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

What was ‘literature’ during the time of its emergence and first developments in the West, in the combined Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world?

 In this course we try to answer this question by exploring the interactions of two crucial terms: ‘text’ and ‘reader’. What sorts of ‘texts’ were there in antiquity, what sorts of ‘readers’, and how did they relate to each other? We are interested not only in what ancient readers read (i.e., the works themselves, their genres, and traditions), but also in how they chose what to read (i.e., textual criticism: selection, editing, and canonization), in how they read what they had chosen (i.e., literary criticism: modes of reading including literal, ironical, metaphorical, and allegorical), and, ultimately, in why there might be such a thing as a ‘reader’ who would want, or need, to have a ‘text’ to ‘read’ in the first place. Our own readings, all in English translation, include whole texts and excerpts from authors writing originally in Greek (archaic, classical, and koiné; e.g., Sappho, Plato, the gospels); Latin (classical and early Christian: e.g., Cicero, Virgil, Augustine); and Biblical Hebrew (e.g., Genesis, Song of Songs, Job). No Prerequisites. (Optional concurrent tutorials on selected passages in the original Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.)

On-line registration

Course	LIT 204B Comparative Literature II: The Passions and the Interests:  Enlightenment Culture 1600-1800
Professor	Robert Weston
CRN	18439
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 202
Distribution	Literature in English

Often characterized simply as the "Age of Reason," the cultural landscape of the European Enlightenment is shaped by myriad intellectual and literary currents that cannot be reduced to any purely rational calculus of human experience. In this course we will explore two countervailing currents of Enlightenment thought and how their competing visions of "human nature" inform representative literary texts of the period. In the so-called "debate between the passions and the interests" one can distinguish two tributaries of thought. The first—which runs from La Rochefoucauld and Hobbes to Mandeville and French Materialists like Helvétius, La Mettrie and D'Holbach—considers the individual to be governed primarily by self-interest. The second current—which runs from Shaftesbury and moral sense philosophers such as Hutcheson, Ferguson and Hume, to Rousseau and German Neo-Humanists like Lessing, Mendelssohn and Herder—argues against the reduction of human nature to self-interest by drawing attention to benevolent passions such as sympathy, generosity and good will. In addition to examining key arguments in this debate, we will trace its influence on major literary works of the period by authors such as Pope, Congreve, Addison & Steele, and Lillo,; La Rochefoucauld, Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau; Lessing, Mendelssohn, Herder, Schiller and Goethe. On-line registration

Course	LIT 204C Comparative Literature III: Romanticism to Modernity
Professor	Eric Trudel
CRN	18054
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 - 10:20 am Olin 205
Distribution	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, Chekhov, Dostoesky, Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Hofmannsthal, James, Kafka, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Novalis, Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde and Woolf. On-line registration

Course	LIT 251 English Literature II
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	18044
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 - 10:20 am Olin 201
Distribution	Literature in English

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost. but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values. After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers. On-line registration

Course	LIT 252 English Literature III
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	18038
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm Olin 107
Distribution	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	Elizabeth Frank
CRN	18039
Schedule	Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm Aspinwall 302 Th 2:30 -3:50 pm Olin 107
Distribution	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 not only  to restart that project but to point to its completion in later  developments in American literature, specifically modernist fiction  and poetry.  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
Professor	Paul Stephens
CRN	18052
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00 –1:20 pm Olin 205
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies

The postwar United States is arguably the most influential economic and cultural power the world has ever known. This course offers a critical introduction to the vast, complex, and dynamic literature of the period. Our primary readings will consist of fiction and poetry, but some attention will also be paid to film and literary non- fiction. Some likely topics for discussion: cold war politics, feminism, racial identification, civil rights, gay liberation, formation of literary groupings, counter-cultures, consumerism, confessionalism, suburbanization, rise of the information economy, transnationalism, the nation state under threat.