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 17th.
Class 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