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 2015.

15026

LIT 204

CompARATIVE LitERATURE: Ancient QUARRELS, Literature AND CRITIQUE IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Thomas Bartscherer

M . W . .

1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 203

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 epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry (e.g. Vergil, Horace, Catullus, Seneca). 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 all these texts in their original context and to consider how they set the stage for subsequent developments in western literature and criticism. All readings in English. Class size: 22

15082

LIT 204C

Comparative Literature III

Eric Trudel

. T . Th .

3:10pm-4:30pm

OLIN 202

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

15081

LIT 251

English Literature II

Thomas Keenan

M . W . .

11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 203

ELIT

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, charting the transformation from a period of dissent, struggle and war to an emerging industrial and imperial modernity. The seminar will interweave the careful reading of texts across a range of genres (poetry, drama, narrative) with periodic investigations of the cultural and political landscapes in which they were written. Reading work by Donne, Marvell, Milton, Behn, Webster, Jonson, and Defoe, among many others, we'll look at everything from the ethics of love poetry to revolutionary conspiracies, from gender roles in flux to the long shadow increasingly cast by the colonies. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22

15079

LIT 252

English Literature III

Deirdre d'Albertis

. T . Th .

11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 201

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 "modernist" poetry of the 20th century, 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: 22

15080

LIT 258

American Literature II

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

1:30pm-2:50pm

10:10am- 11:30am

ASP 302

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies This course explores the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century and seeks to sharpen student practice in close reading and historical contextualization. Discussion includes a variety of topics, among them the engrafting of American Puritanism with American Romanticism; wilderness, westward expansion and emergent empire; metaphor and figurations of selfhood, knowledge, divinity and nature; the slavery crisis, Civil War and democratic poetics. Writers include Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson. Class size: 22

15078

LIT 259

American Literature III

Alexandre Benson

M . W . .

1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies This course focuses on American fiction and poetry from 1865 to 1930, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression. We’ll discuss the formal tendencies of the period’s major literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism) as well as the stylistic departures of each author. At the same time, we will see how their works interact with the range of historical developments that make this period so dynamic—from the socio-legal contexts of Jim Crow and women's voting rights to the invention of new technologies for recording the voice, from the influence of Darwin to that of Marx, and from the end of Reconstruction to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Authors will include Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joel Chandler Harris, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Jose Marti, Claude McKay, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain, and William Carlos Williams. Class size: 22