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