LITERATURE
SEQUENCE COURSES:
Historical
studies in the Comparative, English and American literature traditions are
organized into sequences. (Please notify the instructor if you need a sequence
course in order to moderate in the spring of 2012.)
12014 |
LIT 204A Comparative Literature I |
Karen Sullivan |
. T . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Medieval Studies In the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri damned Ulysses to Hell in his Inferno
for having roused his companions to undertake one final voyage to see lands
that no man had seen before, yet, before two centuries had passed, another
Italian would be praised for having inspired his followers to embark on a
similar trip, which would end in the discovery of a New World. As a point of
entry into the masterworks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
we will be considering the relationship between the spiritual journey, like
that which the Dante pilgrim pursues through the afterlife, and the physical
journey, like that which Christopher Columbus experiences in the Americas. What
changes in literature as one moves from crusades,
pilgrimages, and the quest for the Holy Grail to voyages of exploration? How
does the sense of self mutate as the sense of the world is transformed? Texts
to be read include an Irish saint’s life, selected Arthurian romances, Dante’s Purgatory,
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron,
and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Class size: 20
12314 |
LIT 204C Comparative
Literature III |
Eric Trudel |
M . W . . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
OLINLC 210 |
ELIT |
This
course examines the peculiar and perplexing Euro-American literary
transformation loosely named Romanticism to Modernity. Reading selected texts
by a limited number of authors very carefully, we will
emphasize the relation between the self and others, as it happens in language:
what is it to meet others in words? How do actions and obligations emerge and
change out of encounters in language? How does what we think or know get linked
with what we do, if it does? And how does language sustain or bear with
non-human others: ideas, the dead, memories, and so on? Readings
from Apollinaire, Balzac, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Dostoesky,
Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Hofmannsthal, James, Kafka, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Novalis, Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde and Woolf. Class
size: 22
12579 |
LIT 2503 English
Literature I |
Lianne Habinek |
. . W . F |
11:50 -1:10
pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance
literature in England, which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts,
the development of critical vocabulary and imagination, and the discovery of
the newly important and long-respected works which make up English literature
from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Some topics which we will explore
include the construction of the author (from “Anonymous” to Shakespeare), the
British “nation” imagined and partly created by the literature, the utopian and
actual societies – urban, rural, monastic, theatrical – which literature sought
to represent. Authors studied, besides Chaucer and Shakespeare, include the
Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip
Sidney. The course is for new and continuing literature majors who want to
explore the range and depth of English literature while they fill program
requirements.
12511 |
LIT 251 English
Literature II |
Terence Dewsnap |
. T . Th . |
3:10 -4:30 pm |
RKC 200 |
ELIT |
This
course will present literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seventeenth-century
writers articulated the conflicts of the times, puritans against witches and
tobacco, aristocrats against puritans, democracy against monarchy, scientific
empiricism against traditions of magical thinking. Some flung themselves wholeheartedly
into the fray, others sought serene escape. Against this background, our main
interest in the first half of the semester is love poetry and religious poetry
including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Vaughan
and Milton. The second half of the semester focuses on traditions of satire and
the beginnings of the novel of ideas: Defoe, Pope, Swift, Johnson and
others. Class size: 15
12123 |
LIT 257 Literature
of the U.S. I |
Elizabeth Frank |
. . W . . . . . Th . |
11:50 -1:10
pm 10:10 - 11:30
am |
ASP 302 ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross–listed:
American Studies, Theology Writings from the first
three generations of Puritan settlement in seventeenth-century Massachusetts
are closely examined not only in relation to each other but also to later
American texts bearing persistent traces of Puritan concerns. We will explore such essential Puritan
obsessions as the authority of divinely authored Scripture, original sin,
predestination, election, free grace, "the city on a hill," and
covenanted relations between mankind and God.
Our focus will be on the rich and fertile complexity, as well as the
problematic features of Puritan belief and rhetoric as they find expression in
Puritan writings. We will look at
Pauline theology, Puritan plain style and metaphor, and the Puritan
construction of the radically individual American self. Authors include notable Puritan divines,
poets, historians and citizens, as well as later writers, among them Jonathan
Edwards, Washington Irving, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Robert Lowell
and Martin Luther King, Jr. Class
size: 22
12469 |
LIT 258 Literature
of the U.S. II |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
. . W . F |
1:30 -2:50 pm |
OLIN 305 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies A study of the
major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. These writers will
spray us outward into an almost unlimited number of related topics: the
politics of westward expansion, the cult of domesticity, the slavery
crisis, the rise of mass entertainment, the materiality of language, and
the nature of unconscious experience, to name a few. Although each of
these fields is interesting in its own right, we will always begin from
and return to the experience of literature, on the assumption that this
experience is so strange, so variable, and so
little understood that it deserves our closest attention. Writers include
Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson,
and Stoddard. Class
size: 20