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 2014.)

11495

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

Thomas Bartscherer

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 204

ELIT

Cross-listed: Classics 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, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Euripides’ Bacchae). Readings from the Latin corpus will include the epic (Vergil) drama (Seneca), and lyric (Catullus, Horace). 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 and Horace. Our twofold aim will be to develop an understanding of 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

11615

LIT 204C Comparative Literature III

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross Listed: Victorian Studies This course will explore the key aesthetic, philosophical, and political issues that emerge in poetry, fiction, theater, and translation from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Readings will include works by Rousseau, de Sade, Hölderlin, Goethe, Blake, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Baudelaire, Rilke, Lorca, Artaud, Celan, Olson, Kerouac, Rothenberg, and Santiago Papasquiaro. Class size: 20

11577

LIT 250 English Literature I

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

An intensive course in medieval and Renaissance English literature which emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of a critical vocabulary and imagination, and the discovery of some of the classic works which make up English literature from Beowulf and Chaucer to the major Elizabethans. Among the topics we will explore are the construction of the author (from "Anonymous" to Shakespeare), the British "nation" (imagined and partly created by the literature), and the urban, rural, monastic, and theatrical levels of society which literature sought to represent. Authors studied include the Beowulf poet, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, among others. The course is primarily for new and continuing literature majors who want to explore the range and depth of English literature while they fulfill program requirements. Class size: 15

11617

LIT 252 English Literature III

Deirdre d'Albertis

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies This course explores developments in British literature from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century—a period marked by the effects of the French and American Revolutions, rapid industrialization, the rise and decline of empire, two world wars, the development of regional identities within Britain, and growing uncertainty about the meaning of "Britishness" in a global context. Beginning with the "Romantics" and ending with avant garde English poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, we will discuss such issues as the construction of tradition, the imagining of Britain, conservatism versus radicalism, the empire, and the usefulness (or not) of periodization. The centerpiece of the course is close reading—of poetry, prose, essays, and plays. There will also be a strong emphasis on the historical and social contexts of the works we are reading, and on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. Class size: 20

11540

LIT 258 American Literature II

Alexandre Benson

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies In this course, we will read major works of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Our historical touchstone will be the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, an event whose influence can be felt across the literary field -- not only in slave narratives but also in sentimentalist fiction and transcendentalist philosophy -- at a crucial moment in what is often called the "American Renaissance." More broadly, the figure of the fugitive will give us a way of approaching the themes of transience, transgression, and retreat that preoccupy many of the authors we will cover: Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Class size: 20

11598

LIT 259 American Literature III

Matthew Mutter

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 201

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: 20