19170

LIT 201 Survey of Linguistics

Benjamin Stevens

. T . Th .

1:00 pm -2:20 pm

OLIN 202

HUM

Cross-listed: Cognitive Science A survey of linguistics, the formal study of language. Our goals are (1) to learn how linguistics analyzes language into component parts; (2) to acquire methods and techniques appropriate to the study of those parts, their patterns, and their interconnections; and (3) to examine the discipline’s conceptual bases, its rich history, and some competing or complementary approaches to language study. In general we ask, “What is ‘language’?” and “Has ‘linguistics’ got it right?” Topics include: (1 and 2) phonetics and phonology (the study of sound-patterns), morphology (word-formation and grammaticalization), and syntax (the arrangement of elements into meaningful utterance); sociolinguistics (the covariation of language with social and cultural factors); and comparative and historical linguistics (morphosyntactic typology and language origins, change, and ‘death’). We also survey (3) key trends, moments, and thinkers in the history of thought about language, Western and non-Western. Prerequisite: completed or concurrent coursework in a foreign language, or consent of instructor.

19052

THEO 201 Poetic Theologies

Nancy Leonard

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 310

HUM

An exploration of the poetic languages by which the poetic seeks the sacred, to embody, contest, celebrate and discover, it, and to affirm the powers and limits of language. We will focus on lyrics and longer poems written in English, within Judeo-Christian traditions, but will include other poetic and religious traditions (Sufi, Hindu) with visits by knowledgeable faculty. Poems by John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot will be read; passages from the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels will be explored, and some work by female mystic poets included. New scholarship by Debra Shuger, Regina Schwartz, Heather Dubrow and more will help us discover specific forms and issues which emerge when the poetic encounters the theological. Core course for prospective majors in theology. All are welcome; no belief is required.

19028

LIT 2019 Reading Poetic Texts

Jeffrey Katz

. T . Th .

4:00 pm -5:20 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

It has been said that the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure are like the reasons for anything else in that we can and should reason about them. The aim of this course is to develop close reading & reasoning skills; attention to the sound system of prosody; to grammar and rhetoric; to prominent uses of figurative language; & to the lyric speaker, all toward answering the following questions: *How do we make sense of a poem? *What is the poem designed to do? *What systems and characteristic features are put in place to get this work done? *How is the poem an object of thought, and how an instrument of thinking, and, more generally, ‘What is poetic knowledge?’ ‘What is the knowledge not obtainable by any other means which is poetical?’ ‘What do we call upon when we call upon poetry?’ Presentations and assignments will orient students toward making interpretations of poems based on analysis of the poetic line via detailed scansions and other appropriate notations; discussion of the relationship between meaning and metrical structure; analysis of line openings and endings; the work of metaphor and other figurative language. Readings will include a broad survey of short poems including work of: Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins, Pound, Auden, Oppen, Niedecker, Hejinian, Ashbery. Additional readings in rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics may also be included.

19225

LIT 2024 Sentimental Traditions in American Literature and Culture

Charles Walls

. T . Th .

1:00 pm -2:20 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies In this course we will examine “sentimentalism” as a philosophical concept that is less about welling tears and fickle emotions than about the role emotion plays in how we organize our political, economic, and cultural lives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, film, and art, we will explore the intersections of gender, race, class, urbanism, nationalism and internationalism to explore the key concept underling sentimentalism: sympathy.  Ultimately we will ask: What are the limits of sympathy as a basis for moral behavior?  In what ways do visual and literary cultures shape sympathetic responses from and among their audiences?  What types of sentimental interventions in American politics have occurred and what have been their strengths and weakness? Among the many works we will consider will be those by Adam Smith, David Hume, William Hill Brown, Mary Rowlandson, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Chesnutt, Lincoln, King, Kara Walker, Agee, Wright, Baldwin, Morrison, Sontag, Spielberg, and John M. Stahl. Only students interested in a serious analytical approach to the topic should apply.

19278

LIT/ HIST 2038 The Boundaries of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century European Historical Narratives.

Stephen Graham

M . W . .

1:30 - 2:50 am

RKC 200

The historical narrative and the historical novel developed interdependently during the nineteenth century. Narrative historians appropriated the techniques of novelists, while historical novelists made new claims to truthfulness by grounding their fictions in historical fact. But history, as Thomas Carlyle reminds us, is three-dimensional, while narrative is linear. The historical writer must impose order upon the past, deciding what to emphasize and what to omit, shaping raw data into narrative patterns that can embody any number of political, social, economic, and philosophical agendas. This course will explore the porous frontier between nineteenth century historiography and realist fiction, comparing classic nineteenth-century historical narratives by Carlyle, Tocqueville, Ranke, and Marx, to fictional narratives by Balzac, Georg Büchner, and George Eliot. Along the way we will question some commonplace distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, examine the epistemological advantages and limitations of narrative as a mode of representation, and follow the nineteenth-century debate about the nature of history through the practice of some of its most significant authors. This course is open to all students, although some background knowledge of nineteenth-century European history would be useful.

19004

LIT / ASIA 205 Representations of Tibet

Li-Hua Ying

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Human Rights The popular image of Tibet in the West has been shaped in large measure by Christian missionaries' accounts, European explorers' travelogues, Hollywood movies, the activities of the Tibetan exile community, including the public appearances of the Dalai Lama. Emerging from these presentations is an exotic and sacred Tibet shrouded in mystery and charm, a Tibet as a site of geographic and cultural exceptionality, and a devastated land suppressed by Communist China. In China, tourism sites on the internet show beautiful pictures of snowcapped mountains and pilgrims turning the prayer wheels around gilded monasteries as evidence of a pristine land and a people enjoying religious freedom and simple living. As images or identities are constructed from both inside and outside, this course is designed to examine the ways in which texts and images are created and interpreted about a land with geographical, historical, cultural, and legal ambiguities. We will attempt to understand modern Tibet from multiple perspectives, primarily through reading works by three groups of writers: the early explorers’ accounts such as /T/*/rans-Himalaya: Discoveries and /**/A/**/dventures in Tibet/** **by** *Sven Anders Hedin and /My Journey to Lhasa /by Alexandra David-Neel; writings by Tibetans both in exile and inside Tibet including /Freedom in Exile: the Autobiography of the Dalai Lama, /and stories and poems by Tashi Dawa, Ah Lai, Yidam Tsering, and Tashi Pelden; and works by contemporary Chinese writers such as Ma Yuan, Ma Jian, and Ma Lihua. We will also look at studies of Tibetan history and religion by scholars such as Melvyn Goldstein and Donald Lopez, as well as modern art in Tibet, especially the Sweet Tea House Group. Topics to be discussed include modernity versus tradition, colonialism, the collaboration-resistance paradigm, the negotiation of identity by Tibetan intellectuals, Sino-Tibetan relations, human rights, cultural authenticity, and Tibetan literary tradition. Conducted in English.

19224

LIT 2139 African-American Literary Traditions II

Charles Walls

M . W . .

12:00 pm -1:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT/DIFF

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 trauma, slavery and empowerment, as well as explore 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.

19280

LIT 2144 Medieval Dream Visions

Mark Lambert

M . W . .

9:00 -10:20 am

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

“I was weary of wandering and went to rest

At the bottom of a broad bank by a brook's side,

And as I lay lazily looking in the water

I slipped into a slumber, it sounded so pleasant.

There came to me reclining there a most curious dream...”

So the fourteenth-century poet William Langland moves us into Piers Plowman, his great allegory, and with more or less similar passages begin many of the most interesting French and English poems of the later Middle Ages. In this course we will read (in modern English translations) some of the best of the poems about love and religion and society and politics which were presented to their audiences as accounts of things observed in dreams. Works studied will include: Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the Dream of the Rood, the Dream of Rhonabwy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Winner and Waster, Pearl, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, the Cuckoo and the Nightingale.

19593

LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule

Jonathan Brent

. T . . .

7:00 – 9:20 pm

OLIN 204

ELIT

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.

19034

LIT 2170 Distempered Imaginations: Madness, Melancholy, and Psychoanalysis in Romantic Literature

Cole Heinowitz

. . W . F

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

It has become something of a truism that the Romantic era, with its emphasis on dreams, depression, delusion, dissociation, trances, and other altered states of consciousness, anticipates the insights of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. This class seeks to correct this notion by exploring how Romanticism, particularly English and German Romantic-era literature, invented what we now know as psychoanalysis. By studying the works of authors such as Coleridge, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Kleist, Hoffman, Hölderlin, and K.W.F. Schlegel, we will examine the shifting and unresolved relationships between modern subjectivity and language and between fantasy and literature. We will complement our investigation of these primary texts with (ostensibly) non-Romantic theoretical works by thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Blanchot, de Man, and Laplanche. Along the way, we will ask questions such as: How does one distinguish eros from thanatos? How does repression manifest itself in literary form? What makes something “uncanny”? What constitutes psychological depth? Is the self constructed from the outside in or, rather, from the inside out? And is there in fact an opposition between these two models?

19374

LIT 2174 The Development of Lesbian Literature in the 20^th and 21st Centuries

Emily Barton Hopkins

. . W . F

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies Commenting in a 2005 New York Times article on the decline of the gay book shop, novelist David Leavitt writes, “More and more, gay fiction is giving way to post-gay fiction: novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether.” Less than a century ago, many gay and lesbian writers hesitated to bring work with homosexual subject matter to public attention (think of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1920 but not published until after his death in 1970), and now, many writers whose work contains lesbian content (e.g., Felicia Luna Lemus and Daphne Gottlieb) no longer choose to identify as lesbian but as “queer” instead. How did times change so quickly? In “The Development of Lesbian Literature,” we will explore how early 20^th century lesbian writers prepared the ground for the current great flowering of lesbian and post-lesbian narratives, particularly novels. We will pay special attention to the stylistic methods our authors employ, and consider their relationship to 20^th- and 21^st-century literature as a whole; we’ll also continually address the question of whether and how an author’s identity affects her work. We will read ten to twelve books during the semester, drawing from the following list of authors: Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Sybille Bedford, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Daphne Gottlieb, Jennifer Levin, T Cooper, Felicia Luna Lemus, Sarah Schulman, Ellis Avery, Alison Bechdel, and Aoibheann Sweeney. We will invite two or three of the contemporary authors to come read to and speak with our class. Admission is by permission of the instructor.

19206

LIT 2175 Medieval Ireland

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 101

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies, Medieval Studies As the fabled “Land of Saints and Scholars,” medieval Ireland is popularly said to have saved civilization when the rest of Europe had entered into its darkest period. During the pre-Christian era, Ireland developed the most extensive mythology of all Celtic countries, with its tales of the Irish national hero Cúchulainn, as well as Conchobar, Deirdre, Fergus, and Mebd. After its conversion in the fifth century, Ireland developed a distinctive Celtic Christianity, whose monks understood life as a pilgrimage they should spend far from home, founding monasteries in the British Isles or on the continent. Though Ireland was conquered by the English in the twelfth century, the Arthurian literature that developed at this time reflected Celtic traditions, including, for example, the belief that the afterworld was located across the sea. The early history of Ireland was largely forgotten during the Protestant Ascendancy, yet it would be recalled by the nationalist movements that fought for Irish independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the Celtic Revival, writers looked to early Ireland for a model of a distinctively Irish identity upon which the new state could be based. Even today, Irish nationalists and British loyalists in Northern Ireland both appeal to early Irish literature to justify their claims to this country. Throughout the course, we will be considering what, if anything, is “Irish” and how the medieval past has defined and continues to define the present. Texts to be read include The Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), the Acallam na Senorach (Tales of the Elders of Ireland), lives of St. Patrick and St. Bridget, The Voyage of Saint Brendan, the lays of Marie de France, the romance of Tristan and Iseut, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and the diaries of the hunger striker Bobby Sands.

19267

LIT 218 Free Speech

Thomas Keenan

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

HDR 302

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights Program (core course) An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and censorship on the Internet. 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). The class will take place jointly, via video link, with a seminar at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia.

19059

LIT 223 Cultural Reportage

Peter Sourian

. T . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

PRE 101

PART

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.

19254

LIT 227 Ideology and Political Commitment in Modern Literature

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 305

ELIT

We examine how political issues and beliefs, be they of the left, right, or center, are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Neruda, and others are analyzed for their ideological content, depth of conviction, method of presentation, and the artistry with which these writers synthesize politics and literature into a permanent aesthetic experience. We also try to determine what constitutes the borderline between art and propaganda and address the question of whether it is possible to genuinely enjoy a work of literature whose political thrust and orientation is at odds with our own convictions. The discussions are supplemented by examples drawn from other art forms such as music, painting, and film. Not available for on-line registration.

19377

LIT 2316 In the Wild: Reading And Writing the Natural World

Susan Rogers

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

In this course we will read and write narratives that use the natural world as both subject and source of inspiration. We will begin the course reading intensively to identify what is nature writing and what makes it compelling (or not). What is the focus of the nature writer and what are the challenges of the genre? To this end we will read works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and then move forward to contemporary writers such as Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Gretel Ehrlich, Peter Matthiessen, E.O. Wilson, and Edward Abbey. There will be weekly writings on the readings. In addition, students will keep a nature journal and produce one longer creative essay that results from both experience and research. This means that students must be willing to venture into the outdoors—woods, river or mountains. Prior workshop experience is not necessary. A curiosity about the natural world is essential.

19376

LIT/ FREN 2405 Nothing Sacred: Twentieth-Century French Literature & the Reign of Terror

Eric Trudel

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 204

ELIT

According to Jean Paulhan, much of 20^th century French literature was given to the experience of “Terror”, a constant state of revolutionary crisis, a severe distrust of language, and a profound hatred of literature that ultimately lead, says Paulhan, to madness and silence. And yet, in declaring that beauty needed to be “convulsive” or that all writing was nothing but filth (“de la cochonnerie”), André Breton and Antonin Artaud were merely stating what many others believed. How did such a “terroristic” imperative come to be central to 20^th century French poetics? Why did literature turn against itself in such a ferocious or sacrificial way? And what is the relationship, if any, between terror in literature and other forms of terrors in a century very much marked by violence? In this course we will examine essays, poems and fictions by Aragon, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, Breton, Caillois, Céline, Duras, Genet, Leiris, Michaux, Paulhan, Sartre, Tzara and Valéry. Taught in English.

19181

LIT 248 Secularisation and Its Discontents: Goethe, Schiller, Heine

Franz Kempf

. T . Th .

2:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLINLC 118

Against the backdrop of the intellectual climate of the time between the Storm-and-Stress movement of the 1760s and the radical trends leading up to the revolution of 1848, we will accompany Germany’s greatest writers on their journey toward modernity and explore with them the tensions and contradictions of the “Age of Secularisation” as manifested in their self-conscious poetry, prose, and plays. Conducted in English.

19042

LIT 2501 Shakespeare

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 309

ELIT

A careful reading of nine or possibly ten masterpieces by the greatest writer of the English language. The plays, representing the full range of his genius in comedy, tragedy, romance, and royal history, will be chosen from among the following: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Part 1, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest.

19200

LIT 2606 20^th Century American Literature and the Visual Arts

Paul Stephens

. T . Th .

2:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies This course will investigate the relationship of literature to the visual arts, with primary emphasis placed on poetry. We will read art criticism, and examine overlapping generic developments in literature and the arts. Some attention will also be paid to collaborations between writers and visual artists (including artists’ books). Readings include Stein, Pound, Williams, Duchamp, Stieglitz, Loy, O’Hara, Ashbery, Brainard, Creeley, Coolidge, Howe, McGann, Drucker.

19212

LIT 2670 Women Writing the Caribbean

Donna Grover

M . W . .

10:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 107

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American 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 Danticat.

19542

LIT 276 The Holocaust and Literature

Norman Manea

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Jewish Studies Reading and discussion of selected short fiction and novels by such major writers as Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, W.G Sebald, Aleksandar Tisma, Danilo Kis, and by two Nobel Laureates for literature, I. B. Singer and Imre Kertesz. The Holocaust will be considered in comparison with such other genocides of the twentieth century as the Gulag, communist China and Cambodia and Rwanda etc. We will debate questions about the boundaries of art incorporating unprecedented cruelty and despair, about literature of extreme situations (the traditional and the more experimental modes of narrative representation). We will also pay attention to post-Holocaust reality, to the trivialization of tragedy in fashionable, simplistic melodramas of the current mass-media culture or in political-ideological manipulation (especially in former East European socialist countries). Not available for on-line registration. To register for this course see Prof. Manea on Thursday December 4th from 10:00 to 1:00 or 3:00 to 5:00 in his office Seymour 303.

New course:

19708

CNSV 280  Mann and Schoenberg: Music in Fiction and Reality

Eugene Drucker

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed: Literature   (1 credit)   Students will be expected to read Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, with some additional background reading in music theory (especially twelve-tone theory).  The class meetings will consist largely of discussion.  A 10 to 15 page paper will be required, with a draft due after the second class meeting and the final version due at the final class meeting.  The grade will be based on that paper and class participation.  No pre-requisites. This mini-course will meet three times, as follows:  Wednesday, February 4, 1 – 4 p.m.;   Wednesday, February 18, 1 - 4 p.m.;  Wednesday, February 25, 1 - 4 p.m.