LITERATURE

COURSE OFFERINGS FOR FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS
To moderate in Literature a student must have taken at least six courses in the Division including language and creative writing courses. At least one course must be in the English, United States, or comparative literature sequence. This semester, LIT 217 and LIT 259 will be offered to fulfill this requirement, as well as FREN 230 which is being as offered as Part I of the Comparative Literature survey. After Moderation, students choose seminars at the 300 level, and often tutorials in special topics as well. Students are encouraged to study a language other than English, and study-abroad programs are easily combined with a literature major.

Literature I: A student planning to major in the Literature or Writing Programs must take one Literature I course, usually in the first year. Sophomores who have not yet taken Literature I have two sections which give them priority in registration, listed first below. Students exploring literature are welcome in the courses if places are available. This year, some sections of First-Year Seminar taught by members of the Divisional faculty also fulfill the Literature I requirement. These sections are listed below, and are only open to First-Year students. All other First-Year Seminar sections do not carry such credit and are not listed below.

Other Courses: Any course at the 100 level and many courses at the 200 level are open to first-year students.

LIT I A Literature I: Alice Walker

Professor: Michele Frank

CRN: 12324

Time: Wed Fri 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, MES
Through close textual analysis of a selection of Alice Walker's fiction, essays and poetry, we will situate Walker's oeuvre within recent literary, social and cultural developments in the United States. We will focus on developing critical approaches to language though energetic class discussion and frequent papers. Some probable texts: Meridian, The Color Purple, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Revolutionary Petunias, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.

LIT I B Literature I: Donne, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats

Professor: Clark Rodewald

CRN: 12447

Time: Tu Th 11:00 am - 12:30 pm PRE 127

Close readings of some poems by significant poets, all of whom are thought of as key representatives of their periods or schools--metaphysical, romantic, Victorian, modern. Each of the defining categories will be defined, to some extent, questioned, to some extent, but the focus will be on the characteristic excellence of the poets' work. Frequent short papers.

FSEM II AA The Princess de Cleves

Professor: Andre Aciman

CRN: 12360

Time: Mon Wed 11:00 am - 12:20 pm ASP 302

Madame de LaFayette's The Princess de Cleves is not only the first modern European novel, it is also the first in a long line of psychological novels. Known for her lucid and shrewd "anatomy of the human heart," Madame de LaFayette presents her reader with an intricate cross-section both of the psyche and of the world of the royal courts, where the politics of love and the love of politics were frequently indistinguishable. This course will assess the nature of psychological fiction, the immediate intellectual and theoretical context of its origins, its followers and imitators, and recent critical readings of Madame de LaFayette's work.

FSEM II BLF War and Peace

Professor: Benjamin LaFarge

CRN: 12454

Time: Tu Th 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 309

Among the world's greatest novels, Tolstoy's War and Peace is an unparalleled achievement, as it cannot be reduced to a single genre. It is not a history, although its focus is historical. It is not an epic, though epic in scope; nor is it like any other novel previously written, although its method and its interest in life are novelistic. Yet its importance as a philosophical treatise on the question of chance and agency in warfare and on the interdependence of the public and the private in political affairs is indisputable. In demonstrating the role of the "will of the people" as an historical force, it anticipates later developments in Russian and world history. Perhaps the ultimate source of its power is that it reflects Tolstoy's inner struggle between a rational, positivistic view of history and a spiritual nationalistic view of Russia, but it is the famous characters themselves, ranging from Pierre, Andrew, and Natasha to General Kutuzov and Napoleon, who give this struggle a larger dimension and make it so memorable. We will also read a number of Tolstoy's masterful short stories. Frequent short papers.

FSEM II ML The Deaths of Arthur

Professor: Mark Lambert

CRN: 12434

Time: Mon Wed 10:30 am - 11:50 am LC 208

First, a careful reading of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the classic English telling of the stories of Arthur, Guinevere and the knights of the round table. Then a few weeks for consideration of the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers have used Malory and his tales. Class reports and frequent papers.

FSEM II JR Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

Professor: Justus Rosenberg

CRN: 12455

Time: Mon 3:40 pm - 5:00 pm OLIN 107
Wed 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 107

A close reading of a novel, published in 1947, two years after the defeat of fascism, in which its Nobel Prize winning author attempts to come totterms with the German cultural tradition that appeared to drive the Teutonic genius towards pacts with the devil We analyse the ways in which the original Faust legend is masterfully blended with the Nazi takeover of Germany as experienced by one of its most fascinating artistic figures, the demon-possessed composer Adrian Lever K hn. The seminar traces the beginning of the Faust legend, examines its earliest literary expression, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Goethe's monumental drama of the 19th century which goes far beyond the traditional plot whereby a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for material advantage and becomes a searching philosophical inquiry into human values and human nature, a theme taken up again in a modern context by Thomas Mann. The readings are supplemented by cinematographic and musical renditions of the Faust theme.

FSEM II CVS Heart of Darkness

Professor: Craig Smith

CRN: 12359

Time: Tu Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 204

We will (re-)read one of the most privileged of twentieth-century texts, Heart of Darkness. But we will read it within a larger field, from which it draws and to which it contributes. Conrad's novella is both a summation of four centuries of European colonization of Africa and a beginning of a distinctly modern kind of knowledge, of the "primitive." Students should expect, therefore, to pay close attention to: the context of Conrad's work (biography, the history of imperialism, aesthetic and intellectual milieu, colonial discourse); critical approaches to the text (psychoanalytic, archetypal, postcolonial, historical, new critical); and its afterlife (travel narratives, popular journalism, V. S. Naipaul, Apocalypse Now, etc.). Required work will include frequent papers and a journal.

FSEM II MVZ Baudelaire's Parisian Prowler

Professor: Marina Van Zuylen

CRN: 12430

Time: Tu The 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 107

Charles Baudelaire is the poet of Modernity. The Parisian Prowler (Le Spleen de Paris), his collection of prose poems published in 1869, constitutes one of the most dramatic turning points in France's literary history. Heavily indebted to Edgar Allen Poe's art theories, Baudelaire's collection of short vignettes about urban despair, document what Sartre saw as the beginning of Existentialism in France. Baudelaire rejected the idea that literature must thematize heroic gestures and inspire timeless ideals. Rather, his portraits of contemporary life are sketches of melancholy and transgression; among the fallen heroes are garbage collectors turned city-archivists, prostitutes communing with the Ideal, and smokers who convert their cigarettes into symbols of art for art's sake. All of these anti-heroes have discovered a paradoxical wisdom of failure. To do nothing, to vegetate, or to engage in gratuitous acts of good and evil is the lot of the Parisian Prowler. To Baudelaire, this existential boredom is the lot of Modern city-dwellers; having lost their ideals, their aimless wanderings become a way of life. As Baudelaire questions the relationship between art and its public (comparing the artist to prostitute), he inaugurates the Modernist notion that unless it is prepared to shock the reader into a new vision of the world, Art is not worth producing. Many of the poems will be read in conjunction with Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, a collection of art and music criticism. There will be additional readings by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

FSEM II WWV The Tale of Genji

Professor: William Weaver

CRN: 12451

Time: Tu The 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 301

Lady Murasaki's rich novel The Tale of Genji, written almost a millenium ago, remains one of the undisputed (but, alas, also unknown) masterpieces of world literature. Around its brilliant and irresistible central character, Prince Genji, a large and varied supporting cast revolves. As no major figure in the story has to work for a living, all have ample time to concentrate on love and on sensuous pleasure. The development of a sensitivity to taste, touch, color, sound is a part of the ideal life at the exquisite Heian court. A reading of the book should sharpen the reader's perceptions in areas beyond literature. The novel is long, but students will be expected to read about half of it and to write frequently about its many aspects. Students will read the Arthur Waley translation--a masterpiece in its own right--though other translations will be discussed; and, indeed, the many questions involved in rendering the story in English will be studied.

LIT 121 First Fiction Workshop

Professor: Robert Kelly

CRN: 12319

Time: Fri 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm OLIN 310

Intended for students new to the college who propose a commitment to writing and have already written stories or worked toward narrative text of any length. This course is designed to help develop skills as well as to encourage new ways of telling. Learning how to transform language into experience, how to compose paragraphs using both narrative logic and musical measure, how to edit one's own work, how to read manuscripts of others with sympathy and critical alertness--these are some of our goals. We will do some reading, and analyze rhetorical strategies of several contemporary writers. Candidates must submit samples of their writing with optional cover letter via campus mail, to Prof. Kelly by 3:00 pm on Tuesday, November 25th.

LIT 207 Major English Romantic Poets

Professor: Clark Rodewald

CRN: 12446

Time: Tu Th 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm PRE 127

Close readings of key works by the "first generation" Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the "second generation" poets Keats and Shelley. Time permitting, we'll try to figure out Byron's brand of Romantics. Some definition of "Romanticism" might emerge, but the focus will be on individual poems and the characteristic qualities of each poet. Class size 12-15.

LIT 2106 Poet's Workshop: Metrical Verse

Professor: Benjamin LaFarge

CRN: 12326

Time: Mon Wed 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 309

This workshop is dedicated to the proposition that for the past 150 years nearly all the greatest poets in the Western tradition--from Baudelaire and Rilke to Yeats and Auden--wrote in strict meters. There are of course notable exceptions, but even the major American modernists, Eliot and Stevens, are only partial exceptions, since each of them found ways of using traditional meters more freely. Many contemporary poets--from James Merrill to Mark Strand--have shown that meter is still viable, and even poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, whose lines are often freely measured, are never entirely free. The best of these traditionalists are now emerging as among the most memorable poets of our time. In this workshop students will submit their own poems for discussion and criticism, but they will also be asked to read a good many poems (in translation where necessary) by the modern masters of formal verse. Candidates must submit samples of their (metrical) work to the instructor. Some previous acquaintance with meter is expected. Limited enrollment.

LIT 2107 Byzantium

Professor: Karen Sullivan

CRN: 12327

Time: Tu Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
of related interest: Medieval Studies
This course considers the culture and, especially, the literature of Byzantium, from the city's founding in 330 AD to its fall to the Turks in 1453. We will be studying writings by the Greek Church Fathers, chronicles on the Byzantines by Greeks, Muslims, and westerners, and treatments of such important historical events as the iconoclast controversy and the Crusades, in addition to the principal works of medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry from this region. While our focus will be upon the city nowadays known as Istanbul and its surrounding territories, we will also be examining the Byzantine presence in the Balkans and parts of Italy, Russia, and northern Africa. We will end by contemplating the influence of what W. B. Yeats calls "the holy city of Byzantium" upon later civilizations.

LIT 2108 The Irish Rebellion of 1798

Professor: Terence Dewsnap

CRN: 12328

Time: Fri 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 204

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies
Irish attempts to emulate the American and the French in their revolutions culminated, in 1798, in several uprisings and a French invasion. We will be looking at parliamentary reforms in Georgian Ireland, the organization of The United Irishmen, the rebellion itself, and its various recapitulations in biography, song, story and plays, as well as in histories then and now, 200 years later.

LIT 2109 20th Century African American Autobiography

Professor: Michele Frank

CRN: 12330

Time: Tu Th 1:20 pm - 2:40 pm OLIN 205

Cross-listed: AADS, Gender Studies, MES
Many African American writers have used the autobiographical account to explore and establish their literary and historical "selves." Recognizing that their precarious positions as racial and/or gendered "others" within the American literary and social landscape may offer them the unique perspective of the insider/outsider, African American autobiographers over the past century invite us to address a range of concerns: belonging and alienation; self and community; American identity (or identities) and the interplay of race and gender in the emergence of a black self. Throughout, we will be concerned with autobiography as a literary form with specific conventions that these writers engage as they shape and understand their stories. Far from definitive, the list might include: Booker T. Washington, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary.

LIT 2110 Performance, Body, Gender

Professor: Nancy Leonard

CRN: 12332

Time: Th 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 202

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, Integrated Arts
2 Credits.
The course will meet from the week of Feb. 23rd through the week of April l3.
A course in thinking about performance and a workshop experimenting with it within a variety of art practices: drama, dance, theory, poetics, music, and photography or video. We will explore the recent tendency to discuss meaning as produced in performance rather than embodied in texts performed. Feminist and queer perspectives will be especially important to the work of the course. Guest faculty from a variety of arts will frequently help lead classes. We will read theoretical work about performance, about its social and political values (performing sexual identities, or racial ones), and about particular performers (Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bill T Jones). Theorists include Peggy Phelan, Judith Butler, and Derrida, among others.

LIT 214 Medieval Philosophy

Professor: Karen Sullivan

CRN: 12331

Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies, Philosophy
This course will be devoted to an in-depth study of some of the most important texts in medieval philosophy. It presupposes that medieval philosophers, far from irrelevant to a purportedly postmetaphysical age, were wrestling with the same issues that remain at the heart of modern thinking. We will consider, for example, how the medieval conception of the self both anticipates and challenges that of the most recent philosophical developments, how the medieval debate over universal terms sheds light on both the inaccuracy and the inevitability of social prejudice, and how the medieval idealization of angels reflects an admiration for creatures who transcend the division of the sexes and the troubles that this division has produced. Augustine, Boethius, Peter Ab‚lard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus are among the authors we will be reading.

LIT 217 Development of the English Novel

Professor: Craig Smith

CRN: 12448

Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 201

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
A survey of the modern novel from its origins in the Spanish picaresque novel of the seventeenth century to some of the experimental forms it has taken in our time, including its incarnation as epistolary narrative and comic romance in the eighteenth century and its transformation by the practitioners of realism and naturalism in the nineteenth century. Our focus will be on the novel genre's structural characteristics, both changing and persistent, especially the fluctuating use of sympathetic and ironic points of view, its treatment of time and space, and its relationship to social order, historical change, and aesthetic traditions. In this first semester the authors will range from Cervantes to George Eliot.

LIT 221 Writers Workshop:Prose Fiction

Professor: Peter Sourian

CRN: 12320

Time: Tue 10:30 am - 12:30 pm HEG 300

Practice in imaginative writing. Students will present their own work for group response, analysis, and evaluation. Also reading of selected writers. Permission of the instructor is required; samples of writing must be submitted before registration. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Sourian by 3:00 pm om Tuesday , November 25th.

LIT 222 Intermediate Poetry Workshop

Professor: Robert Kelly

CRN: 12321

Time: Th 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm OLIN 310

Students present their own work to the group for analysis and response. Readings in contemporary poets and the problematics of poetics. Attention will be given to the reality of presenting the poem: the notation on the page, the articulation of the breath aloud. This course is intended for students who have already completed at least one college-level writing workshop (Literature 121, 221, or the equivalent). Candidates must submit samples of verse before registration via campus mail to Prof. Kelly by 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 25th.

LIT 223 Cultural Reportage

Professor: Peter Sourian

CRN: 12335

Time: Tue 3:40 pm - 5:40 pm OLIN 310

For the self-motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. Stress on regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and TV. Work will often be submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings in Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, and by permission of the instructor, but not restricted to majors.

LIT 2301 Studies in Comedy

Professor: Robert Rockman

CRN: 12336

Time: Mon Wed 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 201

of related interest: French Studies
Stage comedy from ancient times to this century. Examination of kinds of comedy (for example, farce, satiric comedy, romantic comedy, comedy of manners, "black" comedy, tragicomedy) and of the strategies and mechanisms of comedy. A study, then, of technique and style as well as of genre. Some of the dramatists: Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Jonson, MoliŠre, Congreve, Wilde, Shaw, Ionesco. Others TBA. Readings in theory and criticism. Regularly scheduled papers. Lower-college students have priority in the course.

LIT 238 Modern African Fiction

Professor: Chinua Achebe

CRN: 12433

Time: Wed 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 101

Cross-listed: MES
A major development in the last fifty years has been the emergence of modern African literature. The seminar will introduce this new writing through a few key texts in its fiction. Those works written originally in French or Arabic will be studied in their English translations. The course will relate the literature, wherever appropriate, to Africa's past traditions as well as its contemporary politics. Required reading will be Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe; July's People, Nadine Gordimer; Ambiguous Adventure, Cheikh Hamidou Kane; A Walk in the Night, Alex La Guma; Houseboy, Ferdinand Oyono; The Palm Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola; God Dies by the Nile, Nawal El Saadawi; and Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga.

LIT 256 18th-Century Studies

Professor: William Wilson

CRN: 12337

Time: Tue Th 9:00 am - 10:20 am OLIN 101

Efforts toward definition of an intellectual spirit that insists on measuring human and cosmic events by man's size and capacity, and that informs various ideas of mankind, converging, it would seem, inevitably on the French Revolution. Works selected from art, music, drama, literature, belles lettres, and philosophical discourse by some, but not all, of the following: Vico, Goldoni, Tiepolo, Mozart, Rameau, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Pope, Swift, Gay, Handel, Hogarth, Blake, Goya. The list is meant to be suggestive, not exclusive. A separate time for listening to recordings and looking at slides may be arranged.

LIT 259 Literature of the United States III

Professor: Elizabeth Frank

CRN: 12338

Time: Wed 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm PRE 101

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies
In this course we will study works written between 1865 and 1930--from the post-civil war period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism, and emergent modernism. Authors include, but are not limited to Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

LIT 261 Growing Up Victorian

Professor: Terence Dewsnap

CRN: 12339

Time: Tu Th 2:50 pm - 4:10 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
Victorian children come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. The readings include nursery rhymes, fairy and folk tales, didactic stories, autobiography, and at least two novels: Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays and Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

LIT 289B English Grammar: Descriptive/Prescriptive (Part II)

Professor: Elizabeth Frank

CRN: 12341

Time: Th 10:20 am - 12:30 pm ASP 302

This is the second part of a year-long, two-semester course, divisible if necessary, but to be taken on the instructor's strong recommendation as indivisible. The course is a comprehensive introduction to the principles of old-fashioned, rigorous English grammar, the way it was taught to our grandparents. Each two-hour class will be divided thus: one hour learning rules and analysis (diagramming included), with examples, exercises, and quizzes; the second hour to be spent as "free time devoted to language play, including (among other topics) idioms, "correct usage, and investigations into English and American prose style, both past and present. Although the course may be taken for remedial purposes, students should have a genuine interest in the topic for its own sake and be able to undertake drill and drudgery with a cheerful heart. Poets, pedants, writers, and prospective teachers especially welcome.

LIT 3103 The American Thirties

Professor: William Wilson

CRN: 12329

Time: Tu 10:30 am - 12:30 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: American Studies
Although clearly set off by the stock-market crash of '29 and the entrance of the United States into World War II, the Thirties is culturally indistinct. The exuberant disillusionment of the Twenties hardened in the Thirties into an awareness of uncomfortable realities: with the Depression it was no longer possible to ignore a shocking disparity between the rich and the poor, and that in turn induced a flirtation with a soft leftism and a potentially militant right; the new theories of human behavior ("popularized Freud") that had served at first as an erotic liberation gave license and terminology for debilitating neuroses; in spite of a strong isolationist predisposition, apprehension grew throughout the decade of the impending global conflict. Social Responsibility was a defining idea of influencing thought and action. Works in various forms--novel, play, poem, essay, painting, film--will be chosen to offer glimpses into this period in America that resists generalization, a few from the stars of the Twenties who had changed tune--perhaps, for example, from later works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, Eliot, O'Neill--a few from emerging authors and artists--perhaps, for example, Roth, Steinbeck, Odets, Wright, West, McCullers--and a few from thinkers responsive to the times--John Dewey, J. M. Hutchins, and Edmund Wilson for example. Film is surely the medium most evocative of the time, and some films will be shown, mainly to provide visual social context; and no look at the Thirties can ignore its music and its painting altogether. Students should be willing, even eager, to respond with long and short essays.

LIT 3104 Modern Tragedy

Professor: Benjamin LaFarge

CRN: 12342

Time: Tu Th 1:20 pm - 2:40 pm OLIN 309

All tragedies see the human condition as doomed; but in classical Greek tragedy the protagonist's fate, usually signified by an oracle or omen, is externalized as something beyond human control, whereas in modern tragedy, starting with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw in the protagonist's character. Since then the modern protagonist has increasingly been seen as a helpless victim of circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is sometimes externalized as history, war, or society, sometimes internalized, but in either case the protagonist has been reduced in stature, so that 20th-century tragedy can only be called ironic--a far cry from the heroic tragedy of ancient Greece. In tracing this complex history, including the disappearance and revival of the chorus, we will examine tragedies by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Buchner, Dostoyevsky (his novel Crime and Punishment), Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller, all of which will be scrutinized in the light of major theories by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others.

LIT 3105 Forms of Love in Novel Form

Professor: Peter Sourian

CRN: 12343

Time: Wed 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 204

Mme de St„el in a powerful 1795 essay on fiction firmly points toward the impending generalized enlargement of scope and consequent great period of the novel, yet concludes: "Love is the principal concern of novels." Not that love comes discretely vacuum-packed. Says Jane Austen: "I write about love and money. What else is there to write about?" This remark--simplistic ring notwithstanding--does entwine society and individual sensibility. Novels, some short, some longer: Mme de Lafayette's Princess of ClŠves, Manon Lescaut, Sorrows of Young Werther, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, George Sand's Indiana, Swann in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover; brief readings in Stendhal, Freud, Rougemont, Ian Watt, Luk cs.

LIT 3106 Masculinity and Film

Professor: Craig Smith

CRN: 12344

Time: Wed Fri 10:30 am - 11:50 am LC 118
Screenings Tue 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Cross-listed: Gender Studies
Recent explorations of contemporary American society, drawing on work in psychoanalysis, sexuality, and narrative, have developed accounts of the ways in which individual and collective experience is formed by processes that lead each of us to occupy (and perhaps to contest) an identity marked by gender-specific attributes, attributes which in turn connect with class position, family position, racial and ethnic identification, age, sex, and sexual orientation. With the help of theoretical readings from the fields of gender studies and cultural studies, and with attention to developments in social history, we will use a popular form, the narrative film, to read a range of masculine styles, crises, and contradictions. Of particular concern will be four film genres: the western, film noir, the war film, and blaxploitation cinema; we will also focus on the teenage-crisis film, from Rebel Without a Cause to recent attempts at representing multiracial youth culture. In addition to critical papers, each student will be responsible for leading one class discussion, which will then be written up as a discussion paper and circulated in the class.

LIT 311 Anglo-American Modernist Fiction: Form, History, and Gender

Professor: Deirdre d'Albertis / Vivian Heller

CRN: 12123

Time: Mon 10:30 am - 12:30 pm PRE 101

Cross-listed: Gender Studies
Commenting on the literature of her day, Gertrude Stein remarked "To the Twentieth Century events are not important. You must know that. Events are not exciting. Events have lost their interest for people." In Stein's writing, and in the writing of her contemporaries, external events have surrendered to the imperious flow of inner life; the search for a way of capturing waywardness, urgency and irreducibility of subjective experience was producing radical experiments in narrative form. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "`The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss." This course sets out to examine Anglo-American modernist narrative as it was fashioned by writers who fractured realist conventions of narration and championed formal innovation in the representation of human consciousness. We will investigate the ways in which the modernist project both did and did not encompass an awareness of history, paying close attention to gender in particular and to revisions of what Wallace Stevens referred to as "the sexual myth." Works under consideration will include Ford's The Good Soldier, Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, Richardson's Pointed Roofs, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf's The Waves, selected short stories by Mansfield, Lawrence's Women in Love, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Barnes's Nightwood and Stein's Three Lives.

LIT 315 The Middle English Mystics

Professor: Mark Lambert

CRN: 12345

Time: Tu 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
Mysticism, which has been broadly defined as "the attempt to achieve communion with God through contemplation and love without the medium of human reason, is richly represented in the literature of medieval England and of medieval Europe as a whole. Only recently, however, have literary scholars come to appreciate how much writings in this tradition show about the minds of medieval men generally, and especially about the minds and experiences of medieval women. In this course we will consider works by the most interesting of the English contemplatives and by a number of their continental predecessors and contemporaries: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Richard Rolle, Walter Hinton, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. No previous knowledge of Middle English required.

LIT 322 Poetry Workshop

Professor: John Ashbery

CRN: 12322

Time: Fri 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 301

Students present their own work to the group for analysis and response. Suggested readings in contemporary poets. Optional writing assignments are given for those poets who may find this useful. This course is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but only by permission of the instructor. Candidates must submit a half dozen pages of their poetry (more or less), with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Ashbery by 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 25th.

LIT 324 Advanced Fiction Workshop

Professor: Bradford Morrow

CRN: 12323

Time: Mon 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 310

Intended for serious writers who have made the personal commitment to creative fiction, this course is designed to help further refine narrative skills and develop writing habits. Learning how better to transform ideas into language, how to balance spontaneity with discipline, how to edit one's work, how creatively and critically to read manuscripts of others--these are a few of the elements of the craft we will engage. Attendance at readings of some visiting writers required. Candidates must submit samples of their fiction (10-15) pages maximum) with optional cover letter, to Professor morrow, by Monday November 25.Candidates must submit samples of their fiction (max 10-15 pages) with optional cover letter via campus mail to Prof. Morrow by 12:00 noon Monday, November 24th.
Registration for this course will be taken on registration day by Michael Bergstein.

LIT 326 The Modernist Novel in Germany

Professor: Leslie Morris

CRN: 12351

Time: Wed 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 306

Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, a complex exploration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has been called the greatest novel in the German language and is often read as an Austrian Ulysses or A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. D”blin's Berlin Alexanderplatz occupies a similarly central position as the major epic novel of the Weimar Republic (and the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1980 epic film Berlin Alexanderplatz). Through our reading of these two works, this course will examine the importance of Berlin and Vienna as centers of cultural expression in the early twentieth century. Discussion will focus on the problems of modernism in Germany and Austria, the emergence of the "epic novel, and the parallel developments in art, music, and film. In addition to our focus on the novels by D”blin and Musil, we will investigate the literary contribution to Weimar and Viennese cultures in the work of Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, and Elias Canetti and in the films of Ruttmann, Jtzi, Lang, and Fassbinder. Conducted in English. Additional tutorials available for students who want to read works in the original.

LIT 328 Alienation and Political Commitment in 20th-Century Literature

Professor: Justus Rosenberg

CRN: 12347

Time: Wed 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 107

In this course we examine how political ideas and theories are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Kafka, Thomas Mann, Malraux, Sartre, Gordimer, Brecht and others, writing in different genres, styles and languages, are analyzed for their ideological content, depth of conviction, method of presentation, and the artistry with which these authors synthesize politics and literature into a meaningful aesthetic experience. We address also the boundary between art and propaganda and whether it is possible to fully appreciate a work of literature whose political orientation is diametrically opposed to ours. In our discussions we will draw upon examples from other art forms such as music and painting.

LIT 331 Translation Workshop

Professor: William Weaver

CRN: 12348

Time: Mon 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm OLIN 308

Although some knowledge of a foreign language is necessary, this is not a language course, and no particular proficiency is required. An interest in language, especially English, is the most important thing. Students will be expected to work on some translation project (preferably prose); but their work will serve chiefly as a basis for the discussion of general problems of translation, its cultural significance, and the relationship between translation and creative writing. Class limited to 12 students.

LIT 333 Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Professor: Bradford Morrow

CRN: 12349

Time: Mon 1:20 pm - 3:20 pm OLIN 202

The diversity of formal narrative strategies employed by serious contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. We will read novels and collections of short fiction which have emerged as high-water marks which may begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. We will examine and compare fictional narratives by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson, John Edgar Wideman, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, and others. Two or three writers, including novelist John Hawkes, are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

LIT 364 Shakespeare and the Body

Professor: Nancy Leonard

CRN: 12352

Time: Tu 10:30 am - 12:30 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Gender Studies
The early modern deployment of the body in theatrical practice is especially interesting to those who want to see how the human subject disports with and displays social and sexual meanings in theater. Shakespeare's work unfixes the later stable categories of sexuality and of gender, partly because boys played girls' parts, partly because the physiology of sex and its governing social and political frameworks were different in his time, and partly because the conditions of theater favored erotic transgressions more than political ones. Cross-dressing, homoerotic alliances, gender polemic, fetishisms, and monstrous bodies appear often--and these will certainly not be the only subjects we talk about in the plays. We will read a range of poems and plays with theatrical, social and interpretive readings drawn from recent work on Shakespeare to supplement our discussions: some sonnets and Venus and Adonis, Richard III, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra.

LIT 376 Kafka and his Neighbors

Professor: Norman Manea

CRN: 12353

Time: Mon 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm OLIN 202

The course will start with some of Kafka's letters, diaries and fiction and will carry on with the diffusion of the kafkaesque into the absurdity and cruelty of the history of our times. The literary heritage of Central and Eastern Europe, Kafka's "neighborhood," will be studied through the work of such writers as Musil, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Ionesco, Kundera, Danilo Kis. An examination of these books for their literary value and as a reflection of the cultural landscape and the tumult of history, as the best introduction to Central Europe's creativity, its genius and its tragedy.