12001 |
LIT 201 Survey of
Linguistics |
Benjamin Stevens |
M . W . . Su . . . . |
8:30 - 9:50
am 7:00 - 10:00
pm |
OLIN 202 OLIN 102 |
HUM |
Cross-listed:
Mind, Brain & Behavior
A survey of
linguistics, the formal study of language. In general we ask, “What is
‘language’?” and “Has ‘linguistics’ got it right?” Particular topics include:
phonetics and phonology (the study of
sound-patterns), morphology (word-formation and grammaticalization),
and syntax (the arrangement of elements into meaningful utterance);
sociolinguistics (the covariation of language with social and cultural factors);
and comparative and historical linguistics (morphosyntactic typology and
language origins, change, and ‘death’). We also consider key trends, moments,
and thinkers in the history of thought about language, Western and
non-Western. This survey is supplemented by critical discussion of films
depicting 'exotic' languages or unusual language situations as well as
linguistics in practice. Prerequisite: completed or concurrent
coursework in a foreign language, or consent of instructor. Class
size: 22
A survey of linguistics, the formal study of
language.
In general we ask, “What is ‘language’?” and “Has ‘linguistics’ got it right?”
Particular topics include: phonetics and phonology (the study of
sound-patterns), morphology (word-formation and grammaticalization),
and syntax (the arrangement of elements into meaningful utterance);
sociolinguistics (the covariation of language with social and cultural
factors); and comparative and historical linguistics (morphosyntactic typology
and language origins, change, and ‘death’). We also consider key trends,
moments, and thinkers in the history of thought about language, Western and
non-Western. This survey is supplemented by critical discussion of films
depicting 'exotic' languages or unusual language situations as well as
linguistics in practice. Prerequisite: completed or concurrent
coursework in a foreign language, or consent of instructor.
12242 |
LIT 2026 Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult
Literature |
Maria Sachiko Cecire |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLINLC 120 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies In this course,
students will explore questions about what children can, do, and should
read, and be encouraged to think about how the notion of childhood is
constructed and reproduced through texts and images. We will ask how we, as
adults, can read a book that has been classed as ‘children’s literature’ and
how to theorize texts that are written for children by adults. What makes a
work of children’s literature a classic? Who are these texts really for? Does
children’s literature “colonize” the child? Together we will examine a range of
children’s and young adult literature genres including the school story, fairy
tale, fantasy, historical fiction, and the teenage novel. We will cover issues
such as the child in the book, the pastoral child, crossover fiction, the children’s publishing phenomenon in the years since Harry Potter, and taboo teen realism.
Course texts include literature by Kenneth Grahame, Francis Hodgson Burnett,
J.M. Barrie, Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, J.K.
Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer, among others.
Class size: 20
12243 |
LIT 2029 The Medium and the Message: Focus on
Language |
Maria Sachiko Cecire |
M . W . . |
11:50 -1:10
pm |
OLIN 309 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Science, Technology, and Society Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that
"the medium is the message"; how should we read across the
multimediated texts that we encounter today 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 such as David Crystal, Henry Jenkins, Marshall McLuhan,
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) Twitter accounts.
Class size: 18
12039 |
LIT 2035 Religion
& the Secular in American and British
Modernism |
Matthew Mutter |
. T . Th . |
11:50 -1:10
pm |
OLIN 201 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
American Studies, Religion, Theology This course seeks to understand the
intricate relations between religion and literature in modern culture. We will ask questions such as: Can literature become a substitute for
religion? Is poetic consciousness
connected to religious consciousness?
How does secularism impact the way writers think about the nature of
language or the experience of pain? We
will examine how certain modernists looked to paganism as a form of religious
feeling tied to the fortunes of the body; how some saw poetic speech as a form
of magic; and how others hoped to employ language to attune consciousness to
mystical realities. Lastly, we will
explore how certain literary genres foster religious or secular attitudes
towards human experience. Texts will
include Willa Cather’s Death Comes for
the Archbishop, Nathanael West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts, T.S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets, Jean Toomer’s Cane,
stories by Flannery O’Connor and poems by Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. Class size: 22
12192 |
LIT 2038 Ethical
Life in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy |
Thomas Bartscherer |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30
am |
OLIN 203 |
HUM |
Cross-listed:
Classics, Philosophy Ethical life as
presented and analyzed in ancient Greek texts will be the object of inquiry in
this course. Our goal will be to decipher, examine, and evaluate the ethics
manifest both implicitly and explicitly in the philosophical and literary texts
of Greek antiquity from the archaic age through to the twilight of the
classical period. Particular attention will be paid to Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics, which we will study carefully and in its entirety, the epics (Homer
and Hesiod), tragedy and comedy, and Plato. While our reading will focus on the
primary sources, we will also consult scholars such as Bernard Williams and
Martha Nussbaum, who draw liberally from the whole spectrum of classical genres
to argue for the urgent contemporary significance of ancient ethics. Class size: 22
12142 |
LIT 2064 Other
Romanticisms |
Cole Heinowitz |
M . W . . |
11:50 -1:10
pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies It is only in
recent decades that studies of Romantic poetry have begun to look beyond the
“Big Six”: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Yet between
the 1780s and the 1830s, Britain witnessed an explosion of writing by figures
generally excluded from the canon, including women, proletarians, people of color, peasants, and those deemed insane. In this
course, we will explore the works of this “other” Romantic tradition while
taking into account the ways in which political issues and social mores shape a
body of literature and mediate its status in the marketplace. We will also
question conventional understandings of British Romanticism itself, challenging
assumptions about its historical, aesthetic, political, and philosophical
characteristics. Readings to include works by George Crabbe, Robert Burns, Anna
Barbauld, Mary Prince, John Clare, Thomas Beddoes, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon,
Isaac d’Israeli, and William Hazlitt. Some previous exposure to Romantic
literature is required. Class size: 18
12150 |
LIT 2085 Japanese Literature
and the Question of Aesthetics |
Mika Endo |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 201 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies This course
introduces students to major works of modern Japanese literature, while
considering the question of aesthetic value and its evolving definition. What
is aesthetic value, and what are the ways that this has been defined in
relation to Japanese literature both within Japan and in the United States? We
will interrogate the subject of literary evaluation as a historical issue, but
also reflect upon the way in which contexts of production and translation have
shaped and conditioned our experience as readers. Primary readings are
organized around major themes and movements of twentieth century literary
production, including realism and the confessional novel, literary modernism,
women writers, proletarian literature, life writing, war literature, and
testimony. Some of the major writers we will read are: Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki
Jun’ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Kobayashi Takiji, Miyamoto Yuriko, Oe Kenzaburo,
and Murakami Haruki. All readings in English translation. Class
size: 22
12019 |
LIT 2139 African
American Literature from Wright to Whitehead |
Charles Walls |
. T . Th . |
4:40 -6:00 pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies This course surveys
the literary and historical flashpoints that have shaped the development of
African-American literary tradition(s) beginning with Richard Wright but mainly
focusing on post-1945 writing. Likely
writers include Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, Baraka, Sanchez, Giovanni, Reed,
Morrison, Kennedy, Mackey, Jones, Danticat, and Whitehead. Class
size: 15
12638 |
LIT 2159 Into the
Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles |
Jonathan Brent |
. . W . . |
4:40 -7:00 pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT/DIFF |
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: 20
12144 |
LIT 2185 The Politics and Practice of Cultural
Production in the Modern Middle East and North Africa |
Dina Ramadan |
. T . Th . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 204 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies The politics and practice of cultural
production in the Middle East and North Africa can provide for a complicated
and multifaceted understanding of the region. This course will draw upon a
series of thematic case studies, beginning with European colonialism in the
late 19th century to today’s contemporary globalized context that illustrate
how cultural production can be read as a form of documentation, resistance, and
potential intervention to a range of prevailing narratives. Topics covered
include tradition and modernity, the rise (and fall) of nationalism, narrating
war, the role of the state, and the performance gender. Interdisciplinary in
its approach, this course will ask students to apply the historical and
theoretical frameworks provided through the lectures and readings, to a close
examination of a range of texts including novels (Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia
Djebar), films (Jackie Salloum, Tahani Rached), music (Oum Kalthoum, Dam, Sami
Yusuf), and blogs (Riverbend, Hometown Baghdad) from across the region
including Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Algeria, Iran and Turkey.
This course will be accompanied by a film series. Class
size: 20
12108 |
LIT 2270 Political
Theology |
Nancy Leonard |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 310 |
HUM |
Cross-listed: Political Studies, Theology Who is my
neighbor? What is my responsibility towards him? How do I understand my action if I want to go
beyond the conception of meaningful action as assertion of will, as power—a
conception, Rowan Williams reminds us, in common between the blithe assumptions
of liberalism and the extreme of fascism?
These questions restore the relevance of prior ideas about being, or
ontology, to the political—even the theological—without, of course, presuming
the requirement of belief. This course
will take up many issues: the identity of the other, the ethics of our
engagement with that other, and the lacks addressed by both revolution and
revelation. All seek in some way a language which represents law, community,
and event in more meaningful kinds of human action. Debates will be drawn from
a variety of thinkers from Carl Schmitt, who may be said to have founded the
approach, to Walter Benjamin on violence, Giorgio Agamben, a major figure in
the field (from Homo Sacer, The Sacrament of Language, and the
just-published The Kingdom and the Glory:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government; Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida (from The Gift of Death) on conceptions
of “the other;” Hannah Arendt, Judith
Butler, Eric Santner, and finally Julia Reinhard Lipton, a contemporary critic
whose political theology has restored the urgency of Arendtian reading for
everyday life today. Class size: 15
12090 |
LIT / HIST 2319 Global
Victorians |
Deirdre d'Albertis / Richard Aldous |
. . W . F |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 205 |
HIST |
Cross-listed:
History, Victorian Studies They went
everywhere. They did everything. Long before ‘globalization’ the Victorians had
their own global vision and imagined the world universally. In their voyages of
discovery they set out to achieve mastery of others and themselves, as well as
attempting to map and understand the natural world around them. Our course will
focus on this project of empire both from within and without, drawn together by
texts on exploration and discovery. Authors studied may include Charlotte
Bronté, Joseph Conrad, Sir Richard F. Burton, Rudyard Kipling, Anna Leonowens
and Winston Churchill among others.
Class size: 30
12070 |
LIT 234 Literature
of the Crusades |
Karen Sullivan |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30
am |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Human Rights, Medieval Studies, Middle
Eastern Studies, Religion In November of 1095,
on a field outside Clermont, France, Pope Urban II, long frustrated by the
internecine warfare between Christian barons, urged an assembled council, “Let
them turn their weapons dripping with the blood of their brothers against the
enemy of the Christian faith .... Let them hasten, if they love their souls,
under their captain Christ to the rescue of Sion.” A great shout of “God wills
it” arose from the crowd around him. For much of the following two centuries,
Christians departed in large battalions to attempt to gain possession of the
Holy Lands, now under Muslim control, and, for many centuries thereafter, they
dreamed of reviving such a quest. In this course, we will be studying the
considerable literature produced around the Crusades, which includes epics,
lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons, in an attempt to understand the mentality
that inspired lords and peasants, knights and monks, men and women, and adults
and children to take up the cross. While we will be considering primarily the
Catholic perspective, attention will also be paid to the Greek, Muslim, and
Jewish points of view on these conflicts. What happens when religion goes to
war, when eschatology meets history, and when the celestial Jerusalem becomes
identified with the earthly Jerusalem? Insofar as, for much of the Middle East,
the Crusades continue to provide a principal model of the encounter between
West and East, what exactly is implied by this paradigm? Class size: 20
12165 |
LIT 2406 The Monstrous
Writer in the Moral World, The Moral Writer in the Monstrous World |
Wyatt Mason |
M . W . . |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights How do we read the work of writers whose aesthetic
legacy becomes complicated--radically so--by political 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. In addition to Céline's novels, we will explore the cases and creations of
T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Vladimir Nabokov, with recourse, as well, to
writers who address the monstrous individual in their art. A reading-intensive
course, Lit 2406 will include: "Crime and Punishment" (Dostoyevski),
"Journey to the End of the Night" & "Castle to Castle"
(Céline), "Pnin" (Nabokov), "Ooga-Booga" (Seidel),
selections from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" (Foster Wallace),
"Blood Meridian" (McCarthy), "The Rings of Saturn"
(Sebald), "Sabbath's Theater" (Roth), and "2666" (Bolaño).
Permission of the instructor required via email before enrollment. Class size: 20
12471 |
LIT 2421 Milton |
Lianne Habinek |
. . W . F |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 308 |
ELIT |
Famed
encyclopedist Samuel Johnson terms him “an acrimonious and
surly republican”; T. S. Eliot laments the fact that he had been
“withered by book-learning.” John Milton, man of letters,
Englishman, poet of and for his country. Milton was an insightful
observer of human relationships, and particularly, of man's relationship
to God. In this course, we will examine the history of
mid-17th-century England - religious controversies, the Civil Wars, the
nature of intellectual debate - alongside Milton's important
writings. The key focus of this course will be on Paradise Lost,
though we will also consider Milton’s sonnets, theatrical works, and
essays and tracts. As we do, we shall develop a nuanced and complex
picture of one of England's greatest epic poets. Class size: 18
12470 |
LIT 2482 Narratives
of Suffering |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
. . W . F |
10:10 - 11:30
am |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
American Studies, Human Rights The experience of suffering both provokes
and resists narration. It is at the heart
of many of the world’s great stories and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from
every story. Because intense suffering
takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than
it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the
rest of one’s life?) In spite of all
this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirtsleeves of passersby, and passersby
continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers’ stories. Why?
Our investigations will begin at this point. Texts will include the book of Job, King
Lear, Moby-Dick, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, The
Sound and the Fury, Beloved, Maus, and The Road. Class size: 20
12034 |
LIT 2484 Nineteenth-Century
Self-Fashioning: Life Writing from Wordsworth to Joyce |
Stephen Graham |
M . W . . |
11:50 -1:10
pm |
OLIN 308 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies We will read
autobiographical narratives in a number of genres—the novel, the memoir, the
epic—beginning with Wordsworth’s Prelude
and concluding with Joyce’s Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man. We will explore the wide range of myths,
literary tropes, and narrative strategies adopted by late Victorian writers to
express the deepening alienation of literary artists from middle class culture.
Texts will include Mill’s Autobiography,
George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss,
Ruskin’s Praeterita, Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Gosse’s Father and Son, Darwin’s Autobiography, Wilde’s De Profundis, and Samuel Butler’s The Way of all Flesh. Class
size: 18
12526 |
LIT 2882 Different
Voices, Different Views |
Justus Rosenberg |
M . W . . |
10:10 - 11:30
am |
OLIN 304 |
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