LITERATURE SEQUENCE COURSES:

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 2009.)

19029

LIT 204A Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

4:00 pm -5:20 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

How does a medieval or Renaissance text mean? What is the logic according to which it functions? How can we, as modern readers, enter into that logic? In this course, we will engage in a series of close readings of important texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and try to gain access to their strange textual world. We will attempt to make sense of birds who sing hymns, wolves who become human beings, suicides who become trees, a man by the name of Petrarch who fears that, because of love, he is being petrified, and a woman by the name of Ginevra who becomes a man and a counselor to the sultan. In these lyric poems, lays, romances, epics, and tales, metamorphoses are not just themes, integral to these texts’ content, but structures, integral to their form, and, as such, they lie at the heart of how these texts function. Works to be read include the Carmina Burana, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the lays of Marie de France, Arthurian romance, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

19505

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III: The Experience of Modernity and Its Aesthetic Representations

Youssef Yacoubi

. T . Th .

1:00 pm -2:20 pm

OLINLC 118

ELIT

This course examines the meanings of modernity across a number of  cultural formations and contexts. The course will problematize the  adventures, aspirations, paradoxes, ambiguities of the modern  experience and examine the aesthetic ways by which such experience has  been expressed and articulated. This course is a look at the critical  shifts between Romanticism and modernity, and a study of the  dialectics of modernization and modernism. The course will develop  through a number of critical ways of reading ? Goethe’s Faust,  Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Freud’s Civilization, Society and  Religion, Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy etc.  Of greater importance we shall look at forms of irony that animated  many works of art and thought across boundaries of culture, religion,  ethnicity, class and ideology. The course will be divided  into four topics/themes:
I.    The Concept of World or Comparative Literature
II.    The Experience and Representation of the Crisis of Modernity in Europe
III.    The Modernities of Others to Europe: Empires and its Exiles
IV.    The Responses of the “Orient” to Europe’s Modernity

19106

LIT 250 English Literature I

Mark Lambert

. T . Th .

9:00 -10:20 am

OLIN 303

ELIT

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 include the Beowulf poet, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, 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.

19213

LIT 251 English Literature II

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

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.

19033

LIT 252 English Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

2:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 204

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century—a period marked by the effects of the French and American Revolutions, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, two world wars, the development of regional identities within Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of "Britishness" in a global context. Beginning with the "Romantics" and ending with avant garde English poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of Britain, conservatism versus radicalism, the empire, and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. The centerpiece of the course is close reading—of poetry, prose, essays, and plays. There will also be a strong emphasis on the historical and social contexts of the works we are reading, and on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts.

19192

LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III

Elizabeth Frank

. . W Th .

10:30 -11:50 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies In this course we will track the development of American literature between 1865 and 1930 by working out the relationship between a series of literary movements—realism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism—and a series of epochal historical events: among them, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the corporation, the Indian Wars, imperialism, the “New Woman,” new technologies, the birth of modern consumerism, the trauma of World War I, anxiety over immigration, and the various hedonisms of the so-called “Jazz Age.” While writing (and rewriting) this macro-narrative with our left hands, we will be writing a micro-narrative with our right hands, in which we attend not to vast social panoramas but to the moment-to-moment unfolding of each writer’s art. Authors include Twain, Crane, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Wharton, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Millay, and Faulkner.

19193

LIT 260 Literature of the U. S. IV

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . . . . . Th .

3:00 pm -4:20 pm 2:30 pm -3:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

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 for some and fulfilled hopes and expectations for others: if you imaginatively identified with the nation and its privileged symbols—for example, whiteness, masculinity, weaponry, and material plenty—would you experience the promised sense of centrality and significance seemingly mandated by our military triumph, our wealth, and our extraordinary global prestige? If you didn’t, how would you experience America’s failure to deliver on its promises? In this course, we will be looking at the ways in which American literature imagined and represented what it was like to live American lives between August 6, 1945, and September 11, 2001, the day when American verities and pieties underwent a sudden reckoning. We will begin by asking ourselves and our writers the same question with which R.W. Emerson opens his great essay, "Experience": "Where do we find ourselves?" and go on to examine 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. Can we still see ourselves as the "City on a Hill"? What has happened to the democratic faith of Emerson and Whitman?  Do we possess a "usable past"?  Is ours a society marked by "quiet desperation"? Readings vary each time the course is given; authors may include but are not confined to Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and others. NOTE: 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 into literature 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. Consultation with instructor required on Advising Day, Nov. 19^th, before instructor will accept a student’s online registration.