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 |
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.