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 2017.

17037

LIT 204

CompARATIVE LitERATURE: Ancient qUARRELS: lITERATURE AND iTS cRITIQUE IN cLASSICAL aNTIQUITY

Thomas Bartscherer

M W 1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 201

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

17004

LIT 204A

Comparative Literature I

Karen Sullivan

T Th 3:10pm-4:30pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies It was over the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the concept of the author, as we now conceive of it, first emerged. 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? How does our assumption of who the author is affect how our reading of the text? We will be keeping these questions in mind as we examine the shift in medieval and Renaissance literature 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, The Romance of the Rose, 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: 22

17194

LIT 251

English Literature II

Collin Jennings

T Th 3:10pm-4:30pm

OLIN 205

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 John Milton’s Paradise Lost – but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, 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 stories and novels by Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne which appealed to middle-class readers. This course counts as pre-1800 offering.

Class size: 22

17196

LIT 258

American Literature II

Elizabeth Frank

W Th 11:50am-1:10pm

ASP 302

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban 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

17197

LIT 259

American Literature III

Peter L'Official

T Th 11:50am-1:10pm

HEG 106

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies This course explores American literary production from the late nineteenth century to World War II. In focusing upon this era’s major authors and works, we will closely attend to the formal characteristics of this period’s literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism) while examining many of the principal historical contexts for understanding the development of American literature and culture (including debates about immigration, urbanization, industrialization, inequality, racial discrimination, and the rise of new technologies of communication and mass entertainment). Writers likely to be encountered include: James, Cather, Wharton, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Toomer, Hurston, and Faulkner. Class size: 22