11346

LIT / THEO 201   Kierkegaard: A Writer’s Identity

Nancy Leonard

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 310

HUM

Cross-listed:  Literature, Philosophy   An exploration of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s experiments writing through “indirect communication” (under a pseudonym) as well as “direct communication”  (signed by himself). Kierkegaard sometimes rushed to the printer to keep a work from being published under his name —and other times tried unsuccessfully to sign it in his own name.  Within the works theological, philosophical, and  literary play and seriousness intersect, so a reading in Kierkegaard becomes an experience of feeling boundaries stretched and clarified. What is an author—a person as well as a writer? Can a “whole person” communicate directly? Is all representation inevitably “indirect”? Is religious experience most effective in disguise?  We will read great works that resist religious perspective, or personify skeptical attitudes—as well as those, especially frequent in his later years but present throughout—which embrace theological desire.  Among works studied are Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Repetition, and The Point of View of My Work as an Author. Some reading in his journals and biography, in Kierkegaard scholarship and in other writers will provide context for our questioning, with him, of all identities that comprise the singularity of experience.  Required for prospective theology concentrators but all are welcome, with no requirement of belief.

 

11129

LIT 2007   Imagining Environment in

East Asia

Hoyt Long

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 201

FLLC/DIFF

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies, Human Rights, STS   An exploration of the diverse ways in which nature and the environment have been narrated, aestheticized, conceptualized, exploited, and reimagined in East Asia, with a specific emphasis on Japan and China. This course begins with the very basic question of what it is to imagine environment and one’s relation to it. What gets included in the concept and what gets left out? How has “environment” been imagined historically and across cultural divides? What can we learn about our own perceptions of the non-human world by studying those of other times and places? Interpreting “environment” broadly as any configuration of the human and non-human worlds, we will consider ethical and religious attitudes toward nature as found in traditional philosophical thought (Buddhism, Confucianism); changing literary responses to the natural world (Matsuo Basho, Miyazawa Kenji, Murakami Haruki); the rise of environmental awareness in Japan and China; the social and human impact of industrial pollution (Ashio Copper Mine Incident, Minamata Disease, Three Gorges Dam); popular practices of environmentalism (e.g., eco-tourism, eco-living); and the imagining of East Asia’s environmental future(s). Materials are drawn from the fields of literature, science, sociology, history, philosophy, environmental policy, and film. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.

 

11088

LIT 2008   W. H. Auden

Elizabeth Frank

. . W Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

ASP 302

ELIT

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) is arguably the greatest British (or Anglo-American) poet of the twentieth-century.  A master of poetic forms and techniques, he made a decision early in his career to speak beyond the private self to the world at large--the human community--about matters large and small, while remaining at heart a lyric poet anchored in the personal.  Love, sexuality, the complexities of human relationships, history, art, politics, religion, and changes in ideological fashion all fell within the purview of his limitless curiosity, restless intellect and poetic invention. He was fascinated by the rise of both fascism and communism, whose dangers and seductions, respectively, he explored and dissected. Having digested the whole Western literary tradition, he approached his vocation with endless technical daring and resourcefulness, coupling the utmost seriousness with brilliant wit and a dazzling satiric edge. His poems range from the tragic and sublime to the silly and fun.  Artistically fearless, willing to risk failure, he was always trying something new, and finding ways to broaden and deepen his art.  This class will examine his achievement start to finish, including his forays into opera and drama. Although there are no prerequisites, those taking the course should have a taste for metrical-stanzaic verse and a good sense of humor.

 

11035

LIT 2024   Sentimental Traditions in American Literature and Culture

Charles Walls

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

HEG 300

ELIT

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Human Rights    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

 

11578

LIT 2063   American Literature of the 1950s

Elizabeth Antrim

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 304

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies   Popular representations of the 1950s portray the decade as an age of consensus and conformity, but the literature of the era tells a different story. In this course we will pursue a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and political issues of the 1950s, while tracking the formal experimentations in which its authors were increasingly engaged.  Topics to be discussed include the constraints of suburban life, Cold War paranoia, counterculturalism, race, and gender.  Authors include O'Connor, Salinger, Baldwin, Nabokov, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Miller, Rand, Hansberry, and Updike.  Occasional film screenings will supplement our study of the fiction.

 

11075

LIT 210   Major American Poets

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed:  American Studies  American poetry found its own voice in the first half of the 19th century when Emerson challenged American "scholars" to free themselves from tradition.  For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, acknowledged Emerson as a crucial inspiration.  Emerson himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, were the first to achieve international fame, but it was in Whitman's poems that a distinctively American voice was first heard--a voice that was both oracular and plain-spoken.  At the same time, the oddly metered, introspective poems of Emily Dickinson, mostly unpublished during her lifetime, spoke in a New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American.  Then, only thirty years after her death, the powerful modern voices of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, and Hart Crane began to be heard.  We will read selected poems by each of these, and we will also give equal time to Frost, the great contrarian poet who was dismissed by some as anti-modern but is now acknowledged as one of the greatest.

 

11034

LIT 2139   African-American Literary Tradition II

Charles Walls

M . W . .

12:00 -1:20 pm

OLIN 204

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.

 

11525

LIT 2159   Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles

Jonathan Brent

. . W . .

4:30 – 6:50 pm

OLIN 202

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.

 

11085

LIT 216   Victorian Myth, Fantasy, and

the Art of Detection

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

3:00 -4:20 pm

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Victorian Studies  Extensive reading in the poets Browning and Tennyson. Fiction by Disraeli, George MacDonald, Wilkie Collins, Morris, Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

11320

LIT 218   Free Speech

Thomas Keenan

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

HDR 302

HUM

See Human Rights section for description.

 

11612

LIT 2183   Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction

Helena Sedlackova Gibbs

M . W .  .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982) by the Czech/French writer Milan Kundera is regarded as an exemplification of the postmodern novel. This course will examine how Kundera’s idiosyncratic textual strategies explode traditional notions of character and fictional identity, and unsettle the comfortable boundaries between such oppositional categories as the fictional and factual, totalitarian and democratic, or Eastern and Western.  It will discuss Kundera’s use of philosophy and history, placing his novels in the context of larger political issues, such as the question of Central Europe and the situation in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.  It will also consider matters of language and translation (cinematic as well).  Additional readings will include a wide spectrum of Kundera’s works (The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality), as well as his writings about fiction (The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed).  Each class is organized around supplemental texts by Nietzsche, Broch, Calvino, Fuentes, Rorty, Havel, Brodsky, Benjamin, and Huyssen, among others. 

 

11430

LIT 219   Persia & the Western Imaginary

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies  From the ancient world to the present day, Persia (or, now, the Islamic Republic of Iran) has served as a foil against which “the West” has defined itself. Between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE, the Persian Empire established itself as the largest empire of the ancient world, though one we have tended to appreciate primarily through the eyes of its Greek opponents. For centuries thereafter, Persia’s shahs inspired Western political thinkers, its Zoroastrian sages influenced Western philosophers, and its Sufi poets affected Western writers. It has only been since the late twentieth century—and, especially, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979—that Persia perceived to be seen as a land of wine, poetry, and mysticism and began to be seen as a place of fatwas, chadors, and fundamentalism. How did the homeland of the Three Magi come to be viewed as a member of the Axis of Evil? By studying both Persian and Western authors, we will try to make sense of the complicated relationship between these cultures. Texts to be read include Aeschylus’s Persians, Herodotus’s Histories, Ferdowsi’s Epic of the Kings, Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, the lyrics of Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi, Jean Chardin’s Travels in Persia, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, Nietzsche’s “To Hafez,” Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

 

11361

LIT 230   Innovative Novellas and

Short Stories

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 303

ELIT

An in-depth study of the difference between the short story, built on figurative techniques closely allied to those employed in poetry which allows the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning in the space of a few pages and the novella that demands the economy and exactness of a short work while at the same time allowing a fuller concentration and development of both character and plot. We explore the range and scale of the artistic accomplishments of such masters in these genres as Voltaire, de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Checkhov, Sholem Aleichem, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Collette, and Borges. In addition to writing several analytical papers, students are asked to present a short story or novella of their own by the end of the semester.

 

11432

CLAS 230   “Like Strangers in our

Own City”: Life and Literature in the Late Roman Republic

Benjamin Stevens

. T . . .

. . . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

2:30 -4:50 pm

OLINLC 210

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Literature   The last generations of the Roman Republic saw the loss of traditional lifeways in Italy, sanctioned exploitation at home and abroad, and increasingly intense and varied cultural contacts throughout an unceasingly expanding empire. Roman authors responded to these 'consequences of conquest' by fashioning new forms of Latin literature in genres as diverse as private letters, public speeches, the military diary, epic and lyric poetry, and philosophical prose. That connection -- between profound social and cultural change and vibrant linguistic experimentation -- brought problems of its own and, for us, raises a set of enduring questions. In general, what is -- or could or should be -- the relationship between language and lived experience, between aesthetics and ethics? In particular, what uses of language, and who among its users, may contribute to social performance and cultural critique? In response to difficult and urgent questions, who may speak and who must listen? May speech, in fact, be free?  An essential aim in this writing-intensive course is to consider how studying literature and the conditions of language use may change our own being-in-language. Through an additional hour of meeting most weeks; through writing exercises, language games, and imitations or -- better -- emulations of our ancient authors and their more recent readers; and, above all, by developing a sense of the links between response in language and ethical responsibility, we aim at an intimate revision of our own practices as readers and writers, and, so, of ourselves as beings in language. Special attention is paid to the critical and creative essay.

 

11152

LIT 2316   In the Wild: Reading and

 Writing the Natural World

Susan Rogers

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 305

ELIT

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies  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,  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.

 

11006

LIT 2333   Romantic Women Writers

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

4:00 -5:20 pm

OLINLC 208

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Gender & Sexuality Studies  Women writers were extremely influential in the Romantic period, but their contributions to the tradition of British literature have, until recently, been largely ignored. This class seeks to redefine conventional ideas about Romanticism—as a body of texts, as a set of literary forms, as a cultural moment, and as a nexus of political and philosophical ideas—by examining the work of the period’s most eminent and controversial women writers. Reading the novels, poetry, plays, and essays of writers including Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, we will consider topics such as imagination, idealism, revolution, the quotidian, the sublime, and performance.

 

11448

LIT 2401   The Canterbury Tales

Kathy Hewett-Smith

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

This course will focus upon a study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It will pay particular attention to fourteenth-century social, economic and political contexts for the tales and will consider Chaucer’s aesthetic response to those contexts. Our discussions will be framed by a consideration of the Tales’ manipulation of generic categories and will emphasize some of the mediations through which modern readers are able to apprehend texts from the past as objects of study. We will read The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English; and the course will include a performative public reading by students.

 

11115

LIT / CLAS 250   Rhetoric and Public Speaking

William Mullen

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 201

PART

See Classical Studies section for description.

 

 

11897

LIT 2603   Scholasticism vs. Humanism

Karen Sullivan

. . . . F

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Medieval Studies, Theology   Throughout the Middle Ages, intellectual life was dominated by scholastics, who sought to integrate reason and faith, logic and revelation, classical philosophy and the Christian Gospels. For many of these thinkers, the City of Man, in which we now live, should ideally mirror the City of God, in which we hope one day to reside: both are single, unified, exquisitely ordered and hierarchical structures, in which the individual part is harmoniously integrated into the greater whole.  During the Renaissance, however, intellectual discourse was taken over by humanists, who stressed empiricism over abstraction, rhetoric over dialectic, and Plato over Aristotle as the means of access to truth. With experience now privileged over logic, the personal, subjective perception expressed in literature became prized over the impersonal, seemingly objective cosmos of philosophy.  In this seminar, we will be exploring the tension between scholastic and humanist thought against the background of the rise of the university, the shift from Gothic to Renaissance architecture, the discovery of the New World, and the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, as well as within the context of more recent historical eras.  Authors to be read include Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.