Epic and Empire: Virgil’s Aeneid and Its Readers
	Professor:	Lauren Curtis
	Course Number:		LIT 113		CRN Number:	10166	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 308
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Classical Studies
This course is about Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, the closest thing the ancient Romans had to a founding document. At its first public reading, empresses wept. Roman soldiers carried copies in their backpack, and for centuries children used it to learn their Latin ABCs. Why did this poem, with its narrative of global conquest and manifest destiny, love and sacrifice, exile and loss, speak so powerfully to the Romans about their place in the world? How has it spoken to readers in the past, and how can it speak to us today? We will read Virgil’s poem in English, comparing translations and considering it in the traditions of ancient epic. We will then turn to some of its many and varied readers from antiquity to today—ancient poets cheekily subverting its authority, European and Native American writers rewriting their colonial encounters, female and feminist responses, and its role in US mythology from the founding fathers to New York City’s 9/11 memorial. You do not need to know any language other than English to take this course. This is a Pre-1800 and World Literature Literature course offering.

Dream and Delirium
	Professor:	Ziad Dallal
	Course Number:		LIT 114		CRN Number:	10167	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 106
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Middle Eastern Studies
This class will have two goals. First, to introduce students to the richness of Middle Eastern Literature by focusing on the themes of dreams, delirium, sleep, and sleeplessness; and second, to assess the value and utility of dreams and delirium for literary studies. We will consider how the errancy of dreams unanchors desire, and how this unbound desire can lead to manic states of delirium that force us to assess and adjust our outlooks about life and accepting our doom with the intensity reserved for certain extinction. We will read across centuries from across vast geographies, from Morocco to Iran, tracing the metaphors and tropes of sleep, sleeplessness, dreams, and delirium, and how these literary devices help us make sense of a deranged reality and a world set on extinction. We will consider how dreams and delirium have been put to use in Middle Eastern Literatures to access those other worlds of sleep, and to imagine a world at point zero, with no paradise to lose or regain. In this way, narratives about dreams and delirium allow their authors to address a wide range of social and political issues. Texts may include selections from Ibn Sirine’s Dictionary of Dreams, stories from The One Thousand and One Nights, excerpts from al-Maari’s "Epistle of Forgiveness," ramblings from Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s "Prairies of Fever," Sadegh Hedayat’s "The Blind Owl," Ahmed Bouanani’s "The Hospital," Haytham al-Wardani’s "The Book of Sleep," Elias Khoury’s "As Though She Were Sleeping," short stories by Naguib Mahfouz, Hasan Blasim, and Malika Mostadraf, Hoda Barakat’s "Voices of the Lost," Ghada al-Samman’s "Beirut Nightmares," Hilal Chouman’s "Limbo Beirut," as well as poetry from Ahmad Shamlu, Etel Adnan, and Salim Barakat. The course is designated as Difference and Justice because it will tackle issues of globalization, colonialism, gender and sexuality, and the bankruptcy of the West as central concerns of Middle Eastern Literature. This course is part of the World Literature offering. This course fulfills the moderation requirements for Middle Eastern Studies.

Introduction to the Study of Poetry
	Professor:	Elizabeth Frank
	Course Number:		LIT 123		CRN Number:	10286	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Wed Thurs 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 101
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
This course explores the infinite richness of poetry in English: the dazzling variety of forms and voices available to us across nearly a thousand years of poetic “making.” Working both chronologically and thematically, we will be looking at lyric modes (for example, songs and sonnets), narrative forms (ballads and other kinds of storytelling), occasional poems (birth and death and marriage), epigrams, and dramatic monologues. We will consider Golden (Sweet) style poems and “plain style” poems, devotional poems and love poems, poems for children, pastoral poems, political poems, poems about “everything under the sun.” We will read Old English poems (in translation), anonymous medieval lyrics, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Langston Hughes and poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts movement, and such women poets Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Margaret Walker . We will look at blues lyrics, rap and hip-hop lyrics and lyrics to “The Great American Songbook.” Weekly reading responses, one short paper, and one longer term paper.

Sci-fi Imaginations in South-Korea and Japan: Culture, Society and the Future
	Professor:	Chiara Pavone and Soonyoung Lee
	Course Number:		LIT 155		CRN Number:	10284	Class cap:	30	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 203
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities
This course will engage with works of literature, films, comics and television shows from Japan and South Korea belonging to the genre widely known as ‘SF’ (or ‘science’ and ‘speculative fiction’). We will, in particular, explore what we call the ‘sci-fi imagination’ that pervades cultural products from these two societies, and introduce some of the symbols reflecting the current anger and discomfort of their young people – such as the zombie, the monster/human hybrid, and the poisoned landscape. The main goals of the class will be to understand the history of this East-Asian region through the often inexplicit geopolitical factors molding it, such as the enduring influence of the United States; and to reflect on the sci-fi tropes we will encounter in the course of the semester as challenging entrenched social norms and aspiring towards the creation of a new culture. How does sci-fi literature and media help us imagine different futures - especially from the perspective of gender issues? How do ideas of the human change when facing the utopian or dystopian times to come? - are a couple of the questions we will consider in class. We thus aim to cultivate the students’ ability to conceive alternative societies and challenge the current power structures, while understanding the context of two countries far (but not too far) from their own. The material we will treat includes literary works by authors Murata Sayaka, Fujino Kaori, Bora Jung and Boyoung Kim; and TV series and films such as All of us are dead (2022), Hellbound (2021), Train to Busan (2016), Parasyte (2015), and Battle Royale (2000). This course is part of the World Literature offering.

How to Construct Meaning: Introduction to Chinese Narrative
	Professor:	Shuangting Xiong
	Course Number:		LIT 156		CRN Number:	10327	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 203
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Asian Studies
This course serves as an introduction to “how to read” Chinese narratives. The way that stories are told can reveal a great deal about how people construct meaning. Although the approach of this class is largely aesthetic—meaning we will analyze narrative texts closely to look at the choices each author made when constructing character, plot, symbols, and meaning--we will also spend a lot of class time discussing some of the fundamental questions raised by narrative studies: what values give individual lives meaning? What is the relationship between the individual self and larger systems of order, such as the family, society, the state, and the cosmos? What distinguishes fiction from history? The course covers a broad historical range of texts, from the third century BCE to the present, to maximize our exposure to literary styles as they reflect changing cultural values in China. Texts to discuss include early historical narratives, biographical accounts, fantastic tales, vernacular fiction, classical novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stones), and modern fiction. We will also focus on how the Chinese narrative tradition differs from the realistic mode of western narrative but ultimately was made to reconcile with the demands of realism in the 20th century. In doing so, we will treat each text as an aesthetic text in its own right as well as a window onto changing cultural-philosophical values and mindsets. All readings are in translation; no prior knowledge of Chinese is required. This is a World Literature course offering.

Modern Comedy
	Professor:	Matthew Mutter
	Course Number:		LIT 157		CRN Number:	10285	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 111
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies
The comic imagination, said the poet W.H. Auden, flourishes under the conditions of modernity. This course will explore that connection by introducing students to Anglophone comic fiction of the last century. We will be particularly interested in the capacities of literary comedy to characterize, diagnose, and redress the distinctive malaises of modern experience. Along the way we will ask certain questions: Does comedy reinforce social hierarchies by marking certain figures as socially and morally inferior, or are its energies more egalitarian, as when it emphasizes our shared condition of embodiment and sympathizes with our finitude and frailty? Is comedy conservative, as when it eviscerates utopian fantasies, or radical in its capacity to expose social mores, taboos, and gender norms as ridiculous or arbitrary? We will engage multiple theorists of the comic, from Charles Baudelaire and Sören Kierkegaard to Susan Sontag and Ralph Ellison, and try to explicate their divergent claims: is comedy “Satanic” or “religious,” nihilistic or affirmative? Finally, we will identify different moods, genres and perspectives within comedy, such as satire, irony, grotesque, slapstick, camp and farce. Authors will likely include Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, V.S. Naipaul, Fran Ross, Muriel Spark, Zadie Smith, among others.

The Dean's Colloquium: Reading Virginia Woolf
	Professor:	Deirdre D'Albertis
	Course Number:		LIT 162		CRN Number:	10574	Class cap:	15	Credits:	2
	Schedule/Location:			Fri 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Olin Languages Center 118
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Victorian Studies
As part of the Bard Reading Initiative, the Dean invites students interested in the process of reading narrative fiction to join this two-credit, weekly colloquium. We will meet each Friday from 11-12:30 to investigate what happens when we read the fiction of Virginia Woolf slowly, deliberately, and with attention to attention itself. Our focus will be on three novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). As we encounters these texts, we will endeavor to understand Woolf's lifelong fascination with what it means to be a great reader: "to read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them" (How Should One Read a Book?). Curious readers who are interested in (re)discovering the pleasures particular to these questions are welcome: students will engage in frequent short writing assignments, keep a detailed reading journal, and develop new strategies for working with these texts to be shared with others.

201 Narrative/Poetics/Representation

Narrative/Poetics/Representation
	Professor:	Daniel Williams
	Course Number:		LIT 201 A		CRN Number:	10328	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Reem Kayden Center 100
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.

Narrative/Poetics/Representation
	Professor:	Cole Heinowitz
	Course Number:		LIT 201 B		CRN Number:	10329	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.

Narrative/Poetics/Representation
	Professor:	Ingrid Becker
	Course Number:		LIT 201 C		CRN Number:	10330	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.

200-Level Courses

Engaging Latin American Poetry
	Professor:	Melanie Nicholson
	Course Number:		LIT 2027		CRN Number:	10342	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 204
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Latin American/Iberian Studies; Spanish Studies
This course will consider the work of several major twentieth-century Latin American poets as a kind of dialogue between the “historical” avant-garde (1920s through 1940s) and later poetry, which both honored and contested the principles of the "vanguardia." Class discussions, while emphasizing a close reading of the primary texts, will also examine those texts within the poets’ historical, social, and political contexts. Students will be encouraged to respond to the poetry through intellectual essays as well as multi-disciplinary projects. Conducted in English, with an optional weekly tutorial for those students wishing to read and discuss the poetry in Spanish.

Literature of Experiment
	Professor:	Daniel Williams
	Course Number:		LIT 2084		CRN Number:	10343	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 301
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Experimental Humanities
What is the relationship of literary writing to scientific experiment? How do literary authors and movements characterize themselves (or become characterized) as experimental? This course surveys a range of texts from the 19th century to the present that engage with experiment in terms of content, form, or shape. We will read texts that represent scientific praxis alongside texts that deploy literary improvisation. We will consider what commonalities exist across experimental and avant-garde modes: the commitment to linguistic innovation and metatextual reflection; the prevalence of manifestos and movements; the lure of technology and intermediality. Throughout we will also consider experimentalism as both value and vice in critical method, from deconstruction to the digital humanities. In keeping with our theme, class meetings and assignments will frequently adopt improvisational practices—from automatic writing to chance-driven composition to quantitative analysis. Authors might include Hopkins, Mallarmé, Kafka, Woolf, Stein, Breton, Calvino, Pynchon, Ashbery, Hejinian, Davis, and Saunders.

Writing the Self: Japanese Women’s Diary Literature
	Professor:	Phuong Ngo
	Course Number:		LIT 237		CRN Number:	10331	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 115
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies
Today, keeping a diary is a universal act practiced by many, but in premodern Japan, to write a personal memoir in vernacular Japanese was a highly gendered act. This course explores the origin of diary literature in Japan and follows its trajectory in both its intersection with other contemporaneous genres and its development across time, focusing on works produced by female authors. Topics include the fashioning (and refashioning) of textual identities; the emergence and development of genres; the compliance with and resistance against established notions of genders and other social identities; writing, power, and authority; and more. We will begin with the earliest diaries written by the courtiers of Heian Japan and end with contemporary autobiographical accounts delivered through the media of comics and animated films. Authors include Ki no Tsurayuki, Michitsuna's Mother, Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon, Izumi Shikibu, Takasue's Daughter, Abutsu-ni, Lady Nijo, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kuroyanagi Tetsuko, Takagi Nobuko, Nagata Kabi, and Kawashiri Kodama. All readings are in English translation, and no prior knowledge of Japanese is required. This course is a Pre-1800 and a World Literature Course offering.

Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy
	Professor:	Joseph Luzzi
	Course Number:		LIT 238		CRN Number:	10338	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Albee 106
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Italian Studies
It is no stretch to say that Italy owes its existence—both as an actual nation and “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s term—to the enormous impact of writers like Dante on the drive for political unification that finally occurred in 1861, after centuries of fragmentation stretching back to the Caesars. As we consider this "idea of Italy" in fact and fiction, we will focus on the remarkable role that Italian literature and culture played in the formation of European Romanticism in the 19th century and in the work of authors including Byron, Shelley, de Staël, Goethe, and Wordsworth, among others. We will also study the “three crowns” of Italian Romantic literature, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Manzoni, including the latter's The Betrothed, which is considered Italy's first modern novel. Finally, our inquiry into the dialogue between Italian and European culture will focus on how the artistic Grand Tour helped create the modern myth of Italy and on how later works such as Lampedusa's The Leopard provide precious insight into Italy's belated and fraught path to nationhood.

Inventing England: Intro to Early English Literature
	Professor:	Marisa Libbon
	Course Number:		LIT 250		CRN Number:	10335	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Henderson Comp. Center 101A
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Medieval Studies
How did England, and English literature, begin to take shape (and to shape itself) in the collective cultural imagination? The aim of our work in this course will be twofold: first, to gain experience reading, thinking, and writing about early English literature and its transmission in medieval manuscripts and early-modern printed editions. And second, to devise over the course of the semester our own working narrative about the development of that literature and its role in the construction of the idea of England. We will read widely, from Beowulf to Shakespeare, but we will also read closely, attending to language, choices of form and content, historical context, and the continuum of conventions and expectations that our texts enact and sometimes pointedly break in order to fashion the beginnings of a self-consciously English literature. Other texts may include histories of post-Roman Britain and early medieval England, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and several “romances”—the pop fiction about knights and their adventures—that circulated widely in both Chaucer’s medieval and Shakespeare’s early modern England. This is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Democratic Vistas, Democratic Crises
	Professor:	Elizabeth Frank
	Course Number:		LIT 258		CRN Number:	10340	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Wed Thurs 8:30 AM – 9:50 AM Olin 202
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies
(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) 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.

Encounters With Mephistopheles
	Professor:	Jonathan Brent
	Course Number:		LIT 265		CRN Number:	10456	Class cap:	18	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Hegeman 106
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Jewish Studies; Russian and Eurasian Studies
Encounters With Mephistopheles examines the nature of satanic evil as depicted in two novels written toward the middle of the 20^th Century, The Master and Margarita, by Mikahil Bulgakov, written between 1928 and 1940 and left unfinished at his death; and Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947. Each explores the daemonic, the return of the past, the historical ruptures of modernity. The course would would center on questions of the nature of evil, the function of art, the psychological lures of totalitarianism and the uncanny return of the past—in The Master, during Soviet times; in Dr. Faustus, during the height of World War II in Nazi Germany. Readings would include materials about the Faust legend, Russian and Italian Futurist manifestos, Ortega y Gasset, Nietzsche, Victory Over the Sun, and other short writings, but the core of the class would be a reading of The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov, and Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann.

Axe Novels: Intro to German Modernism
	Professor:	Jana Schmidt
	Course Number:		LIT 266		CRN Number:	10336	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Henderson Comp. Center 106
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Gender and Sexuality Studies
“A book is an axe for the frozen sea inside us,” writes Franz Kafka associating literature with both destruction and renovation. In this course, we will read some of the most compelling and unique modern German works of fiction written in or for the dark: to explore feelings such as ignorance, despair, and anger, as a response to bad times and in pursuit of disaster. Starting with Walter Benjamin’s paradigmatic – and enigmatic – fragment “The Destructive Character” as a credo for modernist writing, we will retrace its development from the proto-modernists Georg Büchner and Heinrich von Kleist to the icy plains of Kafka’s novels. If destructiveness is a search for a new way of inhabiting the world, then where does it leave subjectivity, community, and history? Ending our tour with the theatrical pessimism of Thomas Bernhard, we will discuss how books that stab us make us think differently about the world. What is left to demolish for the artist as great destroyer in an age characterized by the “poverty of experience”? In the course of the semester students will learn about literary tropes like irony and paradox and supplement literary readings with excerpts from philosophy and critical theory. Authors may include Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Klaus Theweleit, Thomas Mann, Bert Brecht, Peter Weiss, Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Musil, and Samuel Beckett. This is a World Literature course offering.

Life into Art: Emergent Modernities from Rousseau to Césaire
	Professor:	Marina van Zuylen
	Course Number:		LIT 271		CRN Number:	10341	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 203
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
This course explores the key aesthetic and philosophical issues that first emerged in European romanticism in the late eighteenth century and have come to define much of our understanding of literature today. From Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Kafka’s “Hunger Artist”, we will pursue several conceptual through-lines: the spiritual vocations of literature in conditions of secularization; visions of the autonomy of art; the shifting boundaries between art and life and aesthetics and politics; the experience of the city; and literature’s relation to the discourses of history and science. Other authors considered may include Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Anton Chekhov, Rubén Dario, Gustave Flaubert, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Documents/Monuments/Memory
	Professor:	Franco Baldasso
	Course Number:		LIT 277		CRN Number:	10334	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 205
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Art History and Visual Culture; Human Rights; Italian Studies
The wave of protests against monuments of Europe’s and America’s colonial, imperialist and racist past – from the defacement of Christopher Columbus statues in the United States to the attacks on the monuments of Edward Colston in England – ignited a thorough reconsideration of how national and local communities commemorate their past and select their shared memory. These controversial events also radically disputed how public institutions such as museums and universities engage with archives and production of knowledge. They also highlighted the role of literature and visual arts both as repositories of individual and collective memory and as pivotal sites for challenging historical forgetting. By providing a contextual and theoretical assessment on modern studies of memory, on the impulse to document every aspect of our lives, and on the role of monuments in shaping our political imagination, the course addresses the profound dialogue between written and visual arts in approaching these questions. The course investigates how written and visual arts challenge shared memory and consoling national narratives pursuing awareness of historical justice and actively promoting a multi-cultural society. In particular it will examine controversial cases such as the “difficult heritage” of fascism’s art and architecture, and multi-directional memory in the Mediterranean, from Holocaust postmemory to the idea of reparative aesthetics. The course will include theoretical readings by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Pierre Nora, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hal Foster, Giorgio Agamben, Marianne Hirsch; authors such as Primo Levi, Anna Banti, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Maaza Mengiste, Igiaba Scego; and visual artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Gianikian & Lucchi, Wael Shawky, Kader Attia, Giorgio de Chirico, Karyn Olivier.

Feelin’ Good New Dimension : Japan in the 70s
	Professor:	Nathan Shockey
	Course Number:		LIT 287		CRN Number:	10333	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Henderson Comp. Center 101A
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities
The 1970s in Japan began with a bang. Excitement thrummed as the Osaka Expo envisioned new futures for humankind, and anxiety gripped the country as protests over the U.S. security treaty thronged cities and campuses. The years that followed were at once laconic and culturally fecund; sandwiched between the radical 1960s and the easy money bubble years of the 1980s, the seventies were a period of rich and varied aesthetic output. This course uses a synchronic lens, moving across a range of literature and media, and going deep into the fiction, film, art, and music of a single transitional decade in order to explore the remaking of modern everyday life. We will consider topics such as science fiction, utopianism, and the retro-futurism of the World’s Fair; new developments in photography and installation art; the Art Theater Guild and avant-garde filmmaking; intersections between belletristic and popular fiction; the student movement and its end; underground and alternative manga; women’s liberation and new currents in feminist thought and action; experimental theater; the Folk Guerrillas, psychedelic rock, and the role of music in protest; novels probing new forms of family life; and much more.

Nietzsche on Art and Music
	Professor:	Thomas Bartscherer
	Course Number:		LIT 290		CRN Number:	10337	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 115
	Distributional Area:			MBV Meaning, Being, Value
	Crosslists: German Studies; Music
“Without music, life would be a mistake,” writes Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his last books. What view of music must one have to believe this? What view of life must one have? What view of art, in the broadest sense? To explore Nietzsche’s thinking on the relationships between art, music, and life—and to develop our own thinking on these matters—will be the aim of this seminar. We will read extensively from Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which he dedicated to the composer Richard Wagner and in which Wagner’s work figures prominently. We will also consider Nietzsche’s subsequent sharp criticisms both of his own first book and of Wagner (The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner). We will focus as well on the radical claim in The Birth of Tragedy that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified to all eternity,” and consider Nietzsche’s later writing on the relationship between art and life in The Gay Science, Twilight of the Idols, and in his notebooks. Concurrently, we will be exploring some of the artworks that are of highest importance for Nietzsche, including both ancient tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and modern operas by Wagner and Bizet. The seminar will incorporate film screenings and guest lectures. Students from all years are welcome to register, and all readings will be in English.

North African Literature
	Professor:	Nuruddin Farah
	Course Number:		LIT 293		CRN Number:	10355	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 305
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights
Born out of cross-cultural currents going back to Roman times, North African literature is unique in its multiplicity of world views, its secularity, and its commitment to an anti-colonial stance. The authors are multi-lingual, the writing is as emblematic of its layered triple identity – at once African, Mediterranean and Arab – as it is reflective of its modernity. One could justifiably think of these authors from North Africa as some the most notable writers in world literature. We will be guided in our analysis by these notions: cosmopolitanism, secularism, and multiculturalism. Among the reading are: The Stranger by Albert Camus; The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani; The Sand Child by Taher Ben Jelloun; Women of Algiers in their Apartments by Assia Djebar; Woman at Point Zero by Nawal Saadawi; In the Country of Men by Hashim Matar; Wedding of Zein by Tayeb Salah; The Ghost Runner by Jamal Mahjoub; and Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifat. We may also watch a number of films based on the texts or made by the authors themselves.

Victorian Twilight: British Fiction of the 1890’s
	Professor:	Stephen Graham
	Course Number:		LIT 297		CRN Number:	10332	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 204
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Victorian Studies
As the Victorian era entered its final decade, British literary culture entered a period of convulsive change: narratives of progress gave way to explorations of degeneration and décadence. New genres–science fiction, the detective novel–came into being. Established authors like Thomas Hardy treated formerly taboo subjects like atheism and prostitution with startling frankness. This course will focus rigorously on British novels of the 1890’s: authors will include Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells.

Cross-listed Classes

Introduction to American Studies
	Professor:	Peter L'Official
	Course Number:		AS 101		CRN Number:	10170	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 202
	Distributional Area:			MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Historical Studies; Literature

Introduction to Indigenous Research Methodologies: Theory and Practice
	Professor:	Luis Chavez
	Course Number:		AS 202		CRN Number:	10171	Class cap:	18	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 101
	Distributional Area:			MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Africana Studies; Anthropology; Historical Studies; Human Rights; Literature; Study of Religions

The Courage to Be: Achilles, Socrates, Antigone, Mother Courage, Barbara Lee
	Professor:	Thomas Bartscherer
	Course Number:		CC 108 A		CRN Number:	10118	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 304
	Distributional Area:			LA MBV Literary Analysis in English Meaning, Being, Value
	Crosslists: Human Rights; Literature

The Courage To Be: Black Contrarian Voices
	Professor:	Thomas Williams
	Course Number:		CC 108 E		CRN Number:	10122	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 306
	Distributional Area:			MBV SA Meaning, Being, Value Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Literature

Augustine, Perfectionism, and the Problem of the Will
	Professor:	David Ungvary
	Course Number:		CLAS 202		CRN Number:	10130	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 203
	Distributional Area:			MBV Meaning, Being, Value
	Crosslists: Literature; Philosophy; Study of Religions

Captive Voices: Literatures of Confinement and Resistance
	Professor:	Ingrid Becker
	Course Number:		HR 285		CRN Number:	10241	Class cap:	18	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 101
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Literature

Great Jewish Books
	Professor:	Shai Secunda
	Course Number:		REL 158		CRN Number:	10245	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 202
	Distributional Area:			MBV Meaning, Being, Value
	Crosslists: Jewish Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Studies

An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov
	Professor:	Marina Kostalevsky
	Course Number:		RUS 220		CRN Number:	10159	Class cap:	22	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 120
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Literature

Materials and Techniques of Poetry
	Professor:	Michael Ives
	Course Number:		WRIT 230		CRN Number:	10354	Class cap:	14	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 302
	Distributional Area:			PA Practicing Arts
	Crosslists: Literature