11692

LIT 204 Comparative Literature: Ancient Quarrels; Literature and Critique in Classical Antiquity

Thomas Bartscherer

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 204

ELIT

Cross-listed: Classical Studies In a celebrated passage from Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that there is “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” In this course, we will consider this and other ways in which ancient authors (or their characters) configured the relationship between poetic production and theoretical inquiry, and therewith gave birth to the practice of literary criticism in the West. We will begin with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, focusing particularly on the understanding of poetry manifest within the world of these poems. Readings from Greek literature will also include lyric poetry (focusing on Sappho and Pindar), and Attic drama (e.g., Aristophane’s Frogs and Clouds, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae). Readings from the Latin corpus will include the epic poetry of Vergil and Ovid, the lyrics of Horace and Catullus, and Roman drama (including Plautus’s Amphitryon and Seneca’s Medea). Concurrently, we will be examining the ongoing critique of literature from the fragments of early Greek philosophers (e.g. Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus), through Plato and Aristotle, to Cicero, Horace, Longinus, and Plotinus. Our twofold aim will be to develop an understanding of all these texts in their original context and to consider how they set the stage for subsequent developments in western literature and criticism. Class size: 22

11307

LIT 204A Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? While these questions continue to divide literary critics today, with some emphasizing the social and others the individual origins of such works, these issues are of particular interest to readers of medieval and Renaissance literature, as it was during this time period that the notion of the author, as we conceive of it today, first developed. In this course, we will be considering the shift from epic to lyric and romance; from orally-based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, and Francois Villon's Testament. Class size: 20

11302

LIT 250 English Literature I

Nancy Leonard

M . W . .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies 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, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and Julian of Norwich. 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. Class size: 18

11696

LIT 251 English Literature II

Lianne Habinek

. . W . F

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost. but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values. After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers. Class size: 20

11686

LIT 257 Literature of the U.S. I

Alexandre Benson

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies This course will look at early and antebellum American writing (17th to mid-19th century) through questions of colonization and indigeneity; race, gender, and authorship; religion and the state; and aesthetic tradition and innovation. Our attention will focus primarily on the formal peculiarities through which individual texts develop their responses to these questions. These texts will include poems, novels, short stories, captivity narratives, and more by authors including Rowlandson, Edwards, Equiano, Wheatley, Jefferson, Schoolcraft, Irving, Brown, Apess, Hawthorne, Poe, and Douglass. Class size: 20

11753

LIT 259 Literature of the U.S. III

Matthew Mutter

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies This course tracks the development of American literature from the late nineteenth century to World War II. We will explore new literary movements such as regionalism and naturalism; we will be particularly concerned with modernism in its various manifestations. Along the way we will attend to a number of political and social developments (westward expansion, U.S. imperialism, WWI, Jim Crow, first-wave feminism, urbanization) as well as certain cultural and intellectual revolutions (the rise of the social sciences, the proliferation of mass media and the commodification of culture, secularization, Social Darwinism) that the literature of the time both absorbed and engaged. Writers likely to be covered include Twain, Crane, James, Cather, Larsen, Toomer, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Frost Pound, Eliot, and Loy.

Class size: 22