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