11509 |
LIT 204A Comparative Literature A: Ancient Quarrels-The Critique of Literature in
Greek and Latin Antiquity |
Thomas Bartscherer |
. T . Th . |
1:00 – 2:20 pm |
OLIN 304 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Classical Studies In
a celebrated passage from Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that
there is “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” In this course,
we will consider this and other ways in which ancient authors (or their
characters) configured the relationship between poetic production and
theoretical inquiry, and therewith gave birth to the practice of literary
criticism in the West. We will begin with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
focusing particularly on the understanding of poetry manifest within the world
of these poems. Readings from Greek literature will also include lyric poetry
(focusing on Sappho and Pindar), and Attic drama (e.g., Aristophane’s Frogs and Clouds, Aeschylus’ Prometheus
Bound, Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae). Readings from the Latin
corpus will include the epic poetry of Vergil and Ovid, the lyrics of Horace
and Catullus, and Roman drama (including Plautus’s Amphitryon and Seneca’s Medea).
Concurrently, we will be examining the ongoing critique of literature from the
fragments of early Greek philosophers (e.g. Anaxagoras, Xenophanes,
Heraclitus), through Plato and Aristotle, to Cicero, Horace, Longinus, and
Plotinus. Our twofold aim will be to develop an understanding of all these
texts in their original context and to consider how they set the stage for
subsequent developments in western literature and criticism. (fulfills
Literature in English distribution)
11568 |
LIT 204B Comparative Literature II |
Gabriela Carrion |
. . W . F |
12:00 -1:20 pm |
OLINLC 206 |
FLLC |
This course will examine
literature from the Early Modern Period from the late fourteenth century through
to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the intellectual and artistic
expressions of the Renaissance and Baroque, we will consider a variety of
genres including poetry, autobiography, novel and drama. The emergence of the
self as a concept especially fraught with tensions as well as possibilities
during this period will serve as a framework in which to address a number of
questions. How does the self define itself in a hierarchical society? How are
concepts such as nature and civilization, history and literature, hero and
anti-hero, believer and heretic defined (and redefined) during this period? We
will explore these questions in the literature of the period with attention to
the context of such diverse events as the Protestant reformation, the encounter
and subsequent colonization of the Americas, and the dissolution of the
Hapsburg Empire. Authors will include Boccaccio, Rojas, Cervantes, Calderón,
Molière, and Inés de la Cruz.
11123 |
LIT 204C Comparative Literature III |
Marina van Zuylen |
. T . Th . |
4:00 -5:20 pm |
OLIN 101 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: French Studies, German Studies Offered as the third installment of the Comparative Literature
sequence, this course will explore some of the key issues in nineteenth and early
twentieth century poetics. It will organize its readings around two opposing
views: should literature carve for itself an autonomous place in the
increasingly commercial world of publishing or should it be, as Balzac would
have it, the scribbling secretary of the human condition, faithfully mirroring
social and economic change? Readings from: Kant, Schlegel, Goethe, E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Poe, Gogol. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Woolf, Bergson and Proust.
11357 |
LIT 251 English Literature II |
Lianne Habinek |
. T . Th . |
1:00 -2:20 pm |
OLIN 203 |
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.
11083 |
LIT 252 English Literature III |
Deirdre d'Albertis |
. . W . F |
10:30 - 11:50 am |
OLIN 201 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
English
Literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from Austen,
Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley through Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin to modernist
writings by Joyce, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
11079 |
LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III |
Elizabeth Antrim |
M . W . . |
3:00 -4:20 pm |
OLIN 203 |
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, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Frost,
Williams, Stevens, Larsen, and Faulkner.
11087 |
LIT 260 Literature of the U. S. IV, 1945 - 2001 |
Elizabeth Frank |
. . W . . . . Th . |
3:00 -4:20 pm 2:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 107 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies 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.
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.