15049 |
LIT
130 Anna Karenina |
Elizabeth Frank |
. . W Th . |
11:50am-1:10pm |
ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Russian & Eurasian Studies An introduction to the study of fiction
through a semester devoted to the close reading of not one, but two translations
of this major Russian novel. In addition
to constant comparison between the two texts, discussion includes such topics
as genre, narrative voice, the representation of character and time,
nineteenth-century French, English and Russian realism, and the play of
psychological analysis and social observation. We will pay particular attention
to the magnificent construction of the novel--what Tolstoy himself referred to
as its "architecture,” particularly its parallel plots. Weekly reading responses
and frequent class reports, two short (4-6pp) papers and one long (10-12) term
paper. Class size: 18
15204 |
LIT
2002 Americans Abroad |
Donna Grover |
. T . Th . |
11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies
Post World War I was an exciting time for American artists who chose to
come of age and discover their own American-ness from other shores. We will
read writers of the so-called ‘ Lost Generation’ including
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in our
reexamination of ‘The Lost Generation’ we will also include expatriate writers
best known for their participation in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset.
The African-American presence in Europe which included the iconic figure
Josephine Baker as well as jazz great Louis Armstrong altered this picture in
ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. This course looks at a period in
which American culture found roots abroad. Class
size: 22
15199 |
LIT
2016 THE
Great american Indian
Novel |
Alexandre Benson |
. T . Th . |
1:30pm-2:50pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT/DIFF |
Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights In a 1996 poem titled “How to Write the Great
American Indian Novel,” Sherman Alexie delivered a series of jabs at the
stereotypical Native narrative: “the hero should often weep alone,” for
instance, while “A white child and an Indian child, gender / not important,
should express deep affection in a childlike way.” The endgame of such a story
is, for Alexie, appropriation and genocide: “all the white people will be
Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts.” The stereotypes are familiar and
Alexie’s satire has bite. Yet of course the field of American Indian fiction is
in fact remarkably diverse in its tropes and its narrative forms. We will
explore that diversity in texts written in English from the mid-nineteenth
century to the early twenty-first. Certain concerns will recur, including
population displacement, ecological disaster, the politics of religion, and the
relationship between orality and print. We will pay equal attention, though, to
each writer’s unique approach to the genre of the novel. In doing so we will
consider relationships to tradition, both cultural and literary, that exceed
the commonplaces Alexie skewers. Authors will include Black Elk, James Fenimore
Cooper, Louise Erdrich, D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, John Oskison, Leslie
Marmon Silko, and Yellow Bird. Class
size: 22
15200 |
LIT
2026 INTRODUCTION
TO Children’S AND
Young Adult LiteraturE |
Maria Cecire |
. T . Th . |
3:10pm-4:30pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Gender
& Sexuality Studies What is children’s literature?
Who is it for? In this course you will be encouraged to think about how notions
of childhood and teenagerdom are constructed and reproduced in Anglophone
literature for young people, and to interrogate the social and literary
structures that guide these representations. Our goal will be to gain
familiarity with the history of children’s literature in English and some of
its major genres, while constantly challenging our own conceptions of childhood
and literariness. How can we, as adults and critics, read a book that has been
classed as “children’s literature”? How do we theorize texts that are written
for children by adults? What makes a work of children’s literature a classic?
Can we say that children’s literature “colonizes” the child? Given their
importance to contemporary ideas of the child, we will give special attention
to questions of gender and sexuality throughout the semester. Course texts
include literature by Kenneth Grahame, J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne
Jones, J.K. Rowling, Jane Yolen, Toni Morrison, and M.T. Anderson, as well as a
selection of picturebooks. Class size: 20
15040 |
LIT
206 SYMPATHY
FOR THE DEVIL: Goethe's Faust |
Franz Kempf |
M . W . . |
11:50am- 1:10pm |
OLINLC 120 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: German Studies An intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in league
with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the world and
experience of life and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of this
striving provides the basis for our analysis of the play's central themes,
individuality, knowledge and transcendence, in regard to their meaning in
Goethe's time and their relevance for our time. To gain a fuller appreciation
of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, we will
also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the
integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (e.g., Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor
Faustus, Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele,
Friedrich W. Murnau's film Faust). Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in
German can sign up for a tutorial in German.
Class size: 18
15201 |
LIT
2119 Shakespeare’s tragedies and the Problem of Government |
Noor Desai |
M . W . . |
10:10am- 11:30am |
HDR 106 |
ELIT |
Shakespeare’s tragedies often deal with men of high social stature
bringing about both personal and public ruin. It often seems as if his most
brutally poignant depictions of individuals in hopeless situations arise when
he is also his most politically barbed. This course explores how Shakespeare
uses the framework of tragedy to investigate the contours of political life,
focusing specifically on how familial, friendship, and sexual ties reflect and
influence overarching governmental realities. How do we understand kingship
after seeing it portrayed as an isolating burden? What do the tragic
consequences of notions like honor and duty reveal to us about the
interrelations between early modern masculinity and political organization? As
we closely analyze several of Shakespeare’s tragedies, including Julius Caesar,
Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and King Lear, we will also examine writings from
the period by figures such as Machiavelli, Bodin, James I, and Thomas Hobbes in
order to develop a rich sense of how the problems of government troubling the
early modern period were exposed and interrogated upon the stage.This course
counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22
15060 |
LIT
2191 Media & Metropolis in Modern Japan |
Nathan Shockey |
M . W . . |
1:30pm-2:50pm |
FISHER ANNEX |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies,
Environmental & Urban Studies, Experimental Humanities Modern Japan has undergone one of the most dramatic urbanizations
in history. In just over a hundred years, it has been transformed from a
largely rural, agricultural nation to a global symbol of high-tech hyper
futurism. In this course, we will explore the myriad ways in which this process
and the urban space it has created has been written and represented. We will
ask how artists attempt to express and make sense of the shifting field of
sensation and information that constitutes city life in modern Japan. We will
also examine questions of what is lost in the rural to urban transition and
problems of nostalgia and alienation in the countryside and new suburbs. The
course explores how the experiences and emotions germane to metropolitan life
can be expressed, communicated, and understood through literature, film,
photography, music, manga, maps, and more. Includes work by Tanizaki, Kafû, Yokomitsu,
Akutagawa, Tatsumi, and Kuroi, and many more. The class also serves to
introduce major works of urban theory by Mumford, Lefebvre, Simmel, Harvey, and
others. Class size: 22
15216 |
LIT
2281 THE PRACTICE OF COURAGE: From Martyrs to Suicide BomberS |
Karen Sullivan |
. T . Th . |
10:10am- 11:30am |
OLIN 204 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Human Rights Is it courageous to stand up for a cause
in which you believe, even to the point of dying for it? In Western history, many
of the individuals who have been most admired for their bravery are those who
have willingly accepted death for a higher purpose, whether that purpose be
intellectual (Socrates), religious (Jewish, Christian, or Muslim martyrs), or
political (Thomas Becket, Mahatma Gandhi, Bobby Sands). But what if the cause
for which the martyr wishes to sacrifice herself is
not a good cause? What if the martyr is driven, not only by a desire for
justice, but by a desire for glory or even for death? What if the martyr is
willing to sacrifice, not only his life, but the lives of other people around
him? What is the relation between martyrdom and fanaticism? In an effort to
answer these questions, we will be considering a series of historical moments
that produced martyrs, including the persecution of the early Christians, the
Battle of Karbala, the Crusades, the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuit
missions in Asia and America, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth
century, and September 11th. Readings will include theories and accounts (both
historical and fictional) of courage and martyrdom from the fourth century BCE
to the present day. This counts as a
pre-1800 offering. This
course is part of the College Seminar “The Practice of Courage.” It is open to Sophomores and Juniors and is limited to 16 students.
Students are required to attend three evening lectures on Mondays from 6-8.
There will also be dinner discussions with guest speakers and students from
other sections of the College Seminar. Class
size: 16
15514 |
LIT
2282 THE PRACTICE OF COURAGE: HEROISM OR HUBRIS? |
Marina van Zuylen |
. T . Th . |
3:10 pm – 4:30 pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
Plato
distrusted literature's ability to complicate, rather than to present straightforwardly
an identifiable moral landscape. With
its allegories and polyphonic voices, its multiple narratives, its deliberate
silences, literature obscures our access to pat answers about good and evil,
vice and virtue. Reading a historical
account of courage or cowardice is radically different from its being conveyed
in a poem, a play, or a novel. This
class will examine how writers have disguised and distorted a quality such as
courage to convey the multi-faceted nature of human motives and motivation. Each of our examples of courage will be read
in clashing ways. Is Antigone's heroism
a mark of hubris? Shakespeare's Cordelia's refusal to lie
stubborness? Don Quixote's idealism
insanity? Melville's Bartleby's
standing up to authority obstructionism?
Are Camus' The Plague and Saramago's Blindness
allegories of courage or narratives of the absurd? Readings will include texts by Emerson,
Tillich, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah
Arendt, and Rony Brauman.
This course is part of the College Seminar “The Practice of Courage.” It is
open to Sophomores and Juniors and is limited to 16
students. Students are required to attend three evening lectures on Mondays
from 6-8. There will also be dinner discussions with guest speakers and
students from other sections of the College Seminar. Class size: 16
15203 |
LIT
2318 Poetry & Aesthetics in Victorian England |
Stephen Graham |
M . W . . |
11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 303 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies John Ruskin announced in Modern Painters (1843) that the greatest
art must contain “the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” Fifty years
later, Oscar Wilde declared with equal assurance the “All art is quite
useless.” What happened in that
intervening half-century? Reading major Victorian poets including Tennyson,
Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and William
Butler Yeats, as well as criticism by Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and
Wilde—among the finest prose stylists of the century—this course follows the
evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the accompanying Victorian debate
about the status of art and of the artist in relation to society. This latter
narrative begins with Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate and cultural
institution, and concludes with Oscar Wilde, social pariah and convicted felon,
as Victorian poets gradually withdraw from their position in the center of the
culture to a stance of defiance, transgression, and martyrdom. Class
size: 16
15059 |
LIT
232 Middle Eastern Cinemas |
Dina Ramadan
Screenings: |
. T . . . . . . Th . |
4:40 pm- 7:00pm 6:00pm-9:00pm |
OLIN 205 PRE 110 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Film & Electronic Arts, Human Rights,
Middle Eastern Studies The history of cinema
in the Middle East is as old as the art form itself; screenings of films by the
Lumiere Brothers took place in Cairo, Alexandria, Algiers, Tunis, Fez, and
Jerusalem just months after their initial screening. The “Orient” quickly
became the location for early cinematic productions and cinemas sprang up
across the region. This course begins with a survey of the development of
national cinemas in the Middle East, before turning to a series of case studies
of influential directors working on both documentary and features films. These
will include Yusif Chahine, Abbas Kiarostami, Omar Amiralay, Avi Moghrabi, and
Elia Suleiman. We will focus on transformations in stylistic and aesthetic
approaches as well as examining the shifting place of cinema, the role of state
sponsorship, the problem of censorship, and the question of audience. Finally,
students will be exposed to the growing body of contemporary video artworks
produced by younger practitioners from the region. All readings will be in
English. Weekly evening screenings are mandatory. Class size: 20
15202 |
LIT
2324 Freudian Psychoanalysis, Language and literature |
Helena Gibbs |
M . W . . |
3:10pm-4:30pm |
OLIN 304 |
ELIT |
The
understanding that language inhabits the human subject is essential to Sigmund Freud’s
conception of the unconscious. It is Freud who taught us to read slips of the
tongue, bungled actions, memory lapses, dreams, and symptoms—what he calls
formations of the unconscious—as speech in their own right. He explored how
speech implicates us at a level far beyond what we typically consider
communication, how it structures us as subjects. While Freud’s influence spans
art, literature, and the human sciences, his ideas continue to engender
wide-ranging debates about the efficacy of the psychoanalytical cure and its
scientific status. Even those critical of Freud’s method, however, cannot deny
that his concepts (such as the unconscious, repression, transference, or sexual
and death drives) have become part of our everyday language, thus bearing witness
to the extent in which they are ingrained in the way we perceive ourselves,
society, and the world. This course will address fundamental concepts of
Freudian psychoanalysis, a field that encompasses both a body of theoretical
knowledge and a clinical practice grounded in listening and interpretation.
Readings will include selections from Freud’s seminal texts, as well as
writings by Jacques Lacan and other authors, whose
work provides insight into Freud’s ideas and their intersection with literature,
film, and poetry, such as StéphaneMallarmé,
Marguerite Duras, and W. G. Sebald. Class
size: 18
15206 |
LIT
2401 The Canterbury Tales |
Marisa Libbon |
M . W . . |
10:10am- 11:30am |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Medieval Studies Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales is an acknowledged masterpiece, a cornerstone of the canon of English
literature. Yet, Chaucer never finished The Canterbury Tales: he spent the last
dozen years of his life working on the Tales,
dying in 1400 and leaving behind a fragmented collection of stories that
readers have been reassembling since his death.
In this course we will undertake a semester-long exploration of The Canterbury Tales, reading the text
and piecing together the picture of medieval England that it at once preserves
and critiques. We will be particularly
concerned with the literary and cultural conventions that Chaucer both expertly
mobilizes and fascinatingly troubles. (This course counts as
pre-1800 offering.) Class
size: 18
15205 |
LIT
2414 The Book Before Print |
Marisa Libbon |
M . W . . |
1:30pm-2:50pm |
OLIN 204 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities, Medieval Studies In 1476, an Englishman named William Caxton set
up England’s first printing press at Westminster in London. Prior to this technological innovation (which
the sixteenth-century writer John Foxe deemed miraculous), books were made from
vellum (animal skin) and were written and illuminated—or painted—by hand. In this course, we’ll study Anglo-Saxon and
medieval English books as both cultural objects and literary artifacts,
dividing our time between learning how manuscript-books were imagined and
constructed before the invention of the printing press, and reading them. For us, “reading” will mean engaging in
literary analysis of our texts—including epics, lyrics, myths, and romances,
all of which will be made available in modern printed editions—as well as
learning to decipher the handwriting of scribes responsible for copying our
texts. Our work will raise questions
about literacy and its definitions; literary labor; the history of the book;
the development and preservation of literary and visual artifacts; the relationship
between image and text; the ethical and practical problems of producing modern
printed editions of handwritten texts; and the proximity of anonymous pre-print
culture to the so-called Internet Age. (This course counts as
pre-1800 offering.) Class
size: 22
15315 |
LIT / THTR
250 Dramatic Structure |
Gideon Lester |
. T . Th . |
1:30pm-2:50pm |
OLINLC 120 |
ELIT |
See
Theater section for description.