11616

AFR/ LIT 120   New Fiction out of Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina

M . W . .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

HEG 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: Africana Studies  In this course we will focus on some of the lesser known, more experimental and adventurous writers of African origin.  All these writers were born after the season of Independence in the 1960s. Most of them came of age as writers in this millennium, as part of a revival of writing and publishing that was part of the rise of the Information age. We will read the apocalyptic short fiction of Nigeria's Igoni Barret, the surreal internal worlds of Waigwa Ndiagui, The Phantastic moral tales by Lazarus Samdi  . We will read Alain Mabanckou's (better known) Broken Glass, Ivan Vladislavic and others. There will be weekly assignments, and a strong focus on close reading of the texts. Class size: 22

 

11669

CLAS / LIT 125   The Odyssey of Homer

Daniel Mendelsohn

. . . . F

10:10  -  12:30 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT

This course will consist of an intensive reading of Homer’s Odyssey over the course of a single semester.  The course is designed to introduce freshmen to more profound and sophisticated techniques of reading and thinking about texts than they will have thus far encountered.  After two introductory sessions, in which students will be introduced to the large issues particular both to this genre (the archaic Greek world, oral composition, the Homeric Question) and to this particular text (“sequels,” epic cycle, the prominence of women, narrative closure), we will read through the epic at a rate of two books per week; two summary sessions will conclude the semester as we look back at the large literary and cultural issues raised by this essential document of the Western tradition: travel as a narrative vehicle for (self-) discovery, the competing satisfactions of the journey and the arrival, the poem’s special interest in poetry and narrative creation. A premium will be placed on student participation in class discussion, and each student will be asked to present a book of the poem (focusing on structural analysis, interpretative issues, etc.) to the class.  At least two papers, midterm, final exam. This course is designed particularly for first-year students. Class size: 22

 

11464

LIT 2006   “The Storm Cloud of the

Nineteenth Century”: Imagining the Environment in English Literature and Culture

Deirdre d'Albertis

. T . Th .

10:10  - 11:30 am

OLIN 306

ELIT

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; STS  In his 1884 lecture, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” social critic and art historian John Ruskin sounds an apocalyptic note of warning when he describes the drastic meteorological changes he has discerned over a lifetime of observing nature.  He remarks upon the deadly “plague-wind” that hangs over Britain: “it looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke . . .but mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls. . .”  In this course we will consider how ideas of the environment were contested and consolidated in the nineteenth-century literary imagination: what would romantic poetry be without the Lake District or the close observation of its natural features by Dorothy and William Wordsworth?  Beginning with the romantics, we will investigate the impact of industrialization on the English countryside.  How was a threatened loss of an imagined integrity necessary to the project of this poetry? How does literature draw upon natural history to represent landscape at this time?  With the advent of Victorianism, representations of the natural environment became even more laden with political and ethical values.  Our readings in Dickens and Hardy will enable us to explore nineteenth-century notions of ecology and the rise of a “fossil fuel imaginary.”  How did Victorians understand the nation to be torn between identification with the country as opposed to the city?  In the context of new concerns for public health, sanitation, and population growth, how did literary culture both elaborate and interrogate patterns of consumption and waste particular to industrialization and modernism? What alternative ethos could be imagined in this period?  We will conclude with early twentieth-century texts by Forster, Lawrence and Ballard dramatizing the “end of nature” in a series of different registers.  Under consideration will be works by:  Thomas Malthus, Gilbert White, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and J.G. Ballard. Class size: 18

 

11943

LIT 2027   Introduction to Latin American Poetry

Melanie Nicholson

. T . Th .

1:30  - 2:50 pm

OLIN 304

FLLC

Cross-listed:  LAIS   Poetry in Latin America has often followed a much more ideological, “popular,” and emotionally accessible trajectory than poetry in North America. This course will trace the development of that poetry rooted in the pueblo—as well as its avant-garde, hermetic, or philosophical counterpart—from the Colonial period to the present day.  Certain early figures such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico) will be examined.  However, the majority of the course will focus on twentieth-century poetry, with particular attention paid to Nobel Prize winners Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. Class discussions, while emphasizing a close reading of the primary texts, will also examine those texts within historical, social, and political contexts.  Conducted in English, with an optional tutorial for those students wishing to read and discuss the poetry in Spanish. Class size: 18

 

11461

LIT 2029   The Medium and the  Message: Focus on Language

Maria Cecire

M . W . .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

RKC 101

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Science, Technology & Society   Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that "the medium is the message"; how should we read electronic literature, the digital humanities, or a Sn00ki tweet in light of this concept, first articulated in 1964? This course will interrogate the uses of language in both more traditional and new media as we consider topics including language change, non-standard vs. Standard English, what constitutes “literary” language, and areas of sociolinguistics such as race, class, and gender. From medieval manuscripts to the Chaucer blogger and from the Gutenberg Bible to Project Gutenberg, we will discuss the transformations in media and language in the past thousand years, and especially those occurring within our lifetimes. Students will choose groups of primary readings for analysis that will supplement course reading from theorists of language and media such as Deborah Cameron, David Crystal, Marshall McLuhan, Lynda Mugglestone, and Peter Trudgill. Visual and otherwise multimediated texts will be integral to the course, and students will maintain a course blog as well as individual (but shared) Google Reader and Twitter accounts.  Class size: 18

 

11654

LIT 209   Modern American Poets

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

10:10  - 11:30 am

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed:  American Studies  The triumph of the first great Modernist pioneers in English (Yeats, Pound, Eliot et al.) created a schism in American poetry, dividing poets and their readers into distinctive camps, which may be loosely characterized as “Mandarin” and “Demotic,”  Soon a Modernist canon emerged, synonymous with the Mandarins, and it is now generally accepted that the greatest of these, in addition to the pioneers, are Wallace Stevens, who experimented with a poetry of linguistic event and philosophic meditation; Marianne Moore, whose esthetic meditations in syllabic verse helped to move poetic discourse towards prose; and William Carlos Williams, who straddled both camps, experimenting with new kinds of rhythm closer to American speech.  All three share a concern with visual art, and many of their best poems prefigure a fixation on painting, film, and photography in American poetry today. Beginning with Stevens, Moore, and Williams, we will trace the Mandarin tradition through Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, and Sylvia Plath; the Demotic tradition, though Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg (another straddler), Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Bob Dylan  Class size: 16

 

11614

LIT 2159   Literary Greatness and Gambles

Jonathan Brent

. . W . .

4:40  - 7:00 pm

OLIN 201

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.  Class size: 18

 

11500

LIT 2179   The African-American Novel

Geoffrey Sanborn

. . W. F

10:10  - 11:30 am

ASP 302

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies   A survey of the African-American novel from 1853 to the present. Works will include The Marrow of Tradition, Passing, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, Invisible Man, Giovanni’s Room, Sula, The White Boy Shuffle, and The Known World.  Class size: 22

 

11609

LIT 2181   Reading and Writing the Essay

Susan Rogers

. . . Th .

1:30  - 3:50 pm

HEG 200

ELIT

This course will involve equal parts reading and writing and is for students who want to develop their creative writing, and their analytic thinking. Readings will be taken from Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, which traces the long tradition of the personal essay from Seneca, through Montaigne (the father of the personal essay) to contemporary stylists such as Richard Rodriguez and Joan Didion. The personal essay is an informal essay that begins in the details of every day life and expands to a larger idea. Emphasis will be placed on reading closely to discover the craft of the work: how scenes and characters are developed, how dialog can be used, how the form can fracture from linear narrative to the collage. Student’s work--three long essays--will be critiqued in a workshop format. This course is for students with experience in writing workshops, fiction writers and poets who want to explore another genre, and writers who enjoy expressing ideas through the lens of personal experience. Those who bring knowledge from other disciplines  are encouraged to apply.  Not available for on-line registration. Admission is by portfolio, with cover letter, due to Prof. Rogers  by 5:00 p.m. on November 17thClass size: 15

 

11613

LIT 2214   Truth and Consequences: 

The Uses of Persona

Paul LaFarge

. T . Th .

3:10  - 4:30 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT

What are fiction writers not allowed to make up? This class will look at works which use literary persona to transgress what we think of as the boundaries of fiction. We’ll read authors who have falsified their own identities, relied on imaginary sources, allowed philosophical concerns to intrude blatantly into the world of their stories, and in other ways called into question the merit of their work as fiction, and/or its authority as anything else. We’ll talk about why fiction writers choose to get mixed up with extra-literary “truth,” and what sort of consequences this has in (and for) their work. Readings by Gertrude Stein, Fernando Pessoa, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, J.T. Leroy, Michael Chabon, Philip K. Dick, Roberto Bolaño, and other authors both real and invented.  Class size: 15

 

11459

LIT 223   Cultural Reportage

Luc Sante

. . . Th .

1:30  - 3:50 pm

OLIN 107

PART

This is a course in practical criticism, with all that that entails: description, evaluation, comparison, judgment, as applied to books, music, pictures, and shows of all sorts, with emphasis on clarity, judiciousness, depth, and style. Weekly writing assignments will be paired with weekly reading assignments: H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Berger, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Edwin Denby, Renata Adler, Patti Smith, Richard Meltzer, many more. Class size: 18

 

11608

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

Susan Rogers

. T . . .

1:30  - 3:50 pm

ALBEE 106

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 Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Edward Abbey. There will be weekly writings on the readings and an occasional quiz. In addition, students will keep a nature journal and produce one longer creative essay that results from both experience and research, and one longer analytical essay. 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.

Class size: 15

 

11488

LIT 2406   The Monstrous Writer and the

Moral World, The Moral Writer and the Monstrous World

Wyatt Mason

. T . Th .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

How do we read the work of writers whose aesthetic legacy is complicated by political or personal history? Is an artistic work a thing apart from the life that fed it, or are there instances when the facts and acts of an author in the world must be admitted into a reading of their art? At the center of this question and this course sits the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century and one of the great fiends of the World War II era -- an anti-semite of tireless and impenitent ardor. In addition to Céline's novels, we will look at the cases and creations of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, Bertolt Brecht, Irène Némirovsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger and André Gide, with recourse, as well, to contemporary writers who address the monstrous individual in their art, including Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Bret Easton Ellis and Roberto Bolaño.  Class size: 20

 

11267

LIT 249   Arthurian Romance

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

3:10  - 4:30 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies  In this course, we will be studying the major works of the Arthurian tradition, from the early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur; to the Welsh Mabinogion; to the French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Merlin and Morgan, and the Quest for the Holy Grail; to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Throughout its history, Arthurian literature has been criticized for the effects it has upon its readers. The alternate world presented by these texts—with their knights errant, beautiful princesses, marvelous animals, enchanted forests, and decentralized geography—can seem more attractive than our own mundane world, and, in doing so, it is feared, can distract us from this world and our responsibilities within it. Over the semester, as we chart the birth and growth of Arthurian romance, we will be considering the uncertain moral status of this genre and its consequences for us today.  Class size: 20

 

11259

LIT 2503   Studies in Shakespeare

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

10:10  - 11:30 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Theater This course will be an intensive examination of selected plays in every genre in which Shakespeare wrote: comedy, tragedy, history and romance.  Although we will remain open to a variety of approaches and questions, we will ground our discussion throughout the semester in the close reading of actual texts.  Plays include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, Henry IV (Parts I and II), Richard III, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.   Class size: 18

 

11465

LIT 2507   Barbarians at the Gate: Degeneration and the Culture Wars of the Fin-de-Siècle

Stephen Graham

M . W . .

1:30  - 2:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

This course tracks the idea of degeneration—the nightmare offspring of Darwinian progress—from the 1857 prosecution of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, to the simultaneous trials of Oscar Wilde (for gross indecency) and Captain Alfred Dreyfuss (for treason) in 1895. Using as our focal point Max Nordau’s 1892 bestseller Degeneration, which argued that contemporary artists like Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen and Friederich Nietzsche were clinically insane, we will explore the prevalent late nineteenth-century identification of new literary forms with madness, criminality and perversion; we will also try to understand why the themes of disease, degeneration and cultural decline fascinated the very artists whom Nordau attacked, and inspired some of their greatest works. Texts include Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Conrad’s Secret Agent, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Zola’s L'Assommoir, Wilde’s De Profundis, Huysmans’ Against Nature, Maeterlinck’s The Princess Maleine, and H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.  Class size: 22

 

11473

LIT 2508   Poets Theater

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

1:30  - 2:50 pm

OLIN LC 115

ELIT

Following the Second World War, innovative American writers took a new interest in poetry as a performative art, turning to theater as a way to question the bounds of subjectivity and community and to expand the formal and political concerns of poetry. Over the last 65 years, Poets Theater has grown and changed, producing a form of writing that defies conventional notions of genre. This course will examine the development of Poets Theater from its beginnings to the present day, focusing on key regional movements including Black Mountain College, New York Poets Theater, and west coast Language Poetry. Our consideration of these movements will be framed by a study of earlier British and American experiments in non-conventional theater, including the Renaissance masque and the Romantic closet drama. Readings will include works by Ben Jonson, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, and Leslie Scalapino. Class size: 18

 

11200

LIT 261   Growing Up Victorian

Terence Dewsnap

. T . Th .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies   Victorian children come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. The readings include nursery rhymes, fairy and folk tales, didactic stories, autobiography, and some longer fiction e.g. Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays and Butler's Way of all Flesh.  Class size: 20

 

11931

LIT 2671  Reading Arab Women Writers

In Translation

Elizabeth Holt

              Writing Lab:

. . . Th .

. T . . .

1:30  - 3:50 pm

1:30  - 2:30 pm

RKC 100

FLLC/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Middle Eastern Studies   This course considers the symbolically overburdened figure of the Arab woman, both as author and literary character, in late twentieth-century fiction and nonfiction from the Arab world.  By investigating the politics of translation, the economics of publishing, and international feminist debates, we will explore the limits and possibilities for reading Arab women writers.  Authors to be discussed include: Leila Ahmed, Nawal al-Saadawi, Hanan al-Shaykh, Assia Djebar, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Mervat Hatem, Marnia Lazreg, Miriam Cooke, Evelyn Accad, Gayatri Spivak and Amal Amireh.  All readings in English.   This is a writing intensive course. Most weeks we will meet for an extra hour writing lab, and regular short writing assignments will be required. The general goals of these labs are to help with the development, composition, organization, and revision of analytical prose; the use of evidence to support an argument; strategies of interpretation and analysis of texts; and the mechanics of grammar and documentation.  Class size: 15

 

11266

LIT 280   The Heroic Age

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:10  - 11:30 am

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies   In this course, we will be reading the great epics and sagas of the early Middle Ages, concentrating upon northern Europe. Through these texts, we will explore the tensions between paganism and Christianity, individual glory and kingly authority, and heroism and monstrosity. Texts to be read include the Old English Beowulf; the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge; the Old Norse Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil’s Saga; the Old French Song of Roland; and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.

 

11226

LIT 2882   Different Voices,

Different Views from the Non-

Western World

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

11:50  - 1:10 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed: Global and International Studies   Significant short works by some of the most distinguished contemporary writers of Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East are examined for their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray the socio-political conditions, spiritual belief systems, and attitudes toward women in their respective countries.  Through discussions and short analytical papers, we seek to determine the extent to which these writers rely on indigenous literary traditions, and have been affected by Western artistic models and developments by competing religions and ideologies.  Authors inclue Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Mahmoud Darwish, Mahasveta Devi and Tayeb Salih.   Class size: 18