Auden and Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic, The Ethical, and the Religious
	Professor:	Matthew Mutter
	Course Number:		LIT 3049		CRN Number:	10349	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Wed 3:30 PM – 5:50 PM Hegeman 300
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
The vocation of the artist, says Caliban to the audience in W.H. Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” is to represent “your condition of estrangement from the truth” and make you “unforgettably conscious” of the “gap between what you so questionably are and what you are commanded without any question to become.” Yet the danger of art, he continues, is that it may “strengthen your delusion that an awareness of the gap is in itself a bridge, your interest in your imprisonment a release.” When the “noble despair of the poets” elicits the cry, ‘Miserable, wicked me, / How interesting I am!’, the reader is tempted to evade the “tasks of time.” Auden’s meditations on poetry and selfhood were deeply shaped by the poet-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for whom subjectivity evolved with three “spheres of existence”: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. This course will trace the contours of these spheres by reading deeply in Kierkegaard’s writings while exploring the trajectory of Auden’s poetic career. We will immerse ourselves in the intellectual and political cultures that shaped Auden’s poetry – Marxism and psychoanalytical theory, the Spanish Civil War, World War II – and explore why he saw Kierkegaard as an indispensable guide to an “age of anxiety.” We will be particularly interested in both writers’ conviction that “the comic” was an essential element of the spiritual life. Throughout the semester we will remain attentive to the distinctiveness of each writer’s poetic voice: for Kierkegaard, to the use of pseudonyms and the play of irony; for Auden, to his early, difficult idioms, his ambition to compose a viable public poetry, and his mastery of a wide range of English verse forms. This poetry seminar fulfils one of the two poetry requirements for students intending to moderate into the Written Arts.

Love and Death in Dante
	Professor:	Joseph Luzzi
	Course Number:		LIT 3205		CRN Number:	10348	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon 12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 107
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Italian Studies
What makes Dante’s Divine Comedy so essential to our lives today, even though it was written seven centuries ago? This course will explore the fascinating world of Dante’s epic poem in all its cultural and historical richness, as we consider Dante’s relation to his beloved hometown of Florence, his lacerating experience of exile, and his lifelong devotion to his muse Beatrice, among many other issues. We will pay special attention to the originality and brilliance of Dante’s poetic vision, as we see how he transformed his great poem into one of the most influential works in literary history, both in Italy and throughout the world. Course/reading in English. This is a Pre-1800 Literature Course offering.

Race and Real Estate
	Professor:	Peter L’Official
	Course Number:		LIT 328		CRN Number:	10345	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Thurs 12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 301
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Human Rights
This seminar explores how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and how, in turn, space can be shaped by racism. Our tools to investigate these constructions will be literary (novels, essays, poetry), theoretical (urban and architectural theory & criticism), historical (art history, urban history), and cultural (film and music). Of these works, we will ask: how have contemporary works of literature, film, architecture, and visual art captured and critiqued the built environment, and offered alternative understandings of space and place, home and work, citizenship and property? How are our spaces and structures imagined and coded in terms of proximity to whiteness and Blackness, class, gender, and ability, and how have we learned to read and internalize such codes? We will consider particular built forms, from shotgun houses to skyscrapers, and from ethnic enclaves to cities writ large. Understandings of difference and justice will be central to understanding relationships between race and real estate. Authors and artists may include: Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, Spike Lee, June Jordan, Mat Johnson, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison. This course is a Literature Program junior seminar and fulfills the American and Indigenous Studies junior seminar requirement. Junior Seminars devote substantial time to methods of research, writing, and revision. This course is also part of the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” Initiative. This is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Fantastika and the New Gothic
	Professor:	Bradford Morrow
	Course Number:		LIT 334		CRN Number:	10346	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon 12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 101
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
The critical boundaries between literary and genre fiction have become increasingly ambiguous over the past several decades, thanks to the liberating and ambitious work by a number of pioneering writers. Traditional gothic authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mary Shelley, Sara Coleridge, E. A. Poe, the Brontë sisters, Bram Stoker, and others framed their tales within the metaphoric landscapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by protagonists whose troubled psyches led them far beyond the verges of propriety and sanity. While embracing these fundamentally dark artistic visions, later masters radically reinvented and contemporized tropes, settings, and narrative strategies to create a new era in this tradition. Identified as the New Gothic, this phase appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon, termed by speculative fiction theorist John Clute as Fantastika, whose achievement is to have taken the genres of the fantastic, fabular, and horror in a similar groundbreaking literary direction. While not dismissing the fundamental spirit that animates its genre forebears, writers such as Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, N. K. Jemisin, Joyce Carol Oates, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, Sofia Samatar, Julia Elliott, George Saunders, and Elizabeth Hand have created a body of serious literary fiction that we will focus on in this course. Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and other authors will join us in person and via Zoom to discuss their work with the class

Prismatic Encounters: The Literary Afterlife of Russian Classics
	Professor:	Olga Voronina
	Course Number:		LIT 370		CRN Number:	10347	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon 3:30 PM – 5:50 PM Hegeman 106
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Russian and Eurasian Studies
“We cannot guess what echoes our words will find,” Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev famously said. This dictum emphatically pertains to great books, which never belong to their age alone. But how do masterworks of literature begin a NEW Life in a different language, cultural context, and literary market? What narrative features and authorial techniques make them suitable for creative adaptation, imaginative translation, or extensive referencing by other writers? And when original literary works do undergo a metamorphosis, who is capable of recognizing them under their new guise? Is the recognition intended? Does it enrich our reading experience and aesthetic proficiency – and in what way? This class examines the afterlives of great Russian novels and short stories as they were appropriated, retold and prismatically refracted by authors writing in English. Reliant on the frameworks of narrative theory and transcultural translation studies, it explores both the original works of literature and their twentieth-century modifications. The Russian half of the reading list includes Nikolai Gogol’s Arabesques, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils, Ivan Turgenev’s Hunter’s Sketches, Anton Chekhov’s “A Lady with a Pet Dog” and “In the Ravine,” and Evgeny Zamyatin’s We. The books’ Anglophone counterparts are Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “First Love,” and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Critical writing will be a strong component of this class. This is a World Literature and a Literature Junior Seminar course.

The 19^th-Century Coming of Age Novel
	Professor:	Daniel Williams
	Course Number:		LIT 393		CRN Number:	10344	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Thurs 3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 301
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
The coming-of-age novel, commonly known as the Bildungsroman (novel of education, formation, development), was a dominant genre of nineteenth-century literature. Tracing the lives of characters through familiar plots—growing up, leaving home, and making one’s way in the world—the Bildungsroman showcases the novel’s ability to express both individual hopes and social constraints, youthful ideals and mature realizations, “great expectations” and “lost illusions.” In this course, we will undertake an in-depth study of several classics of the genre by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, and Edith Wharton. Along the way we will touch on many of the topics and essential tensions of the Bildungsroman: love, desire, and courtship; the family and its substitutes; class, money, and social mobility; the shaping role of gender and the limited social choices afforded to women; and the vocation of art or writing as an alternative to more mainstream careers. We will read a selection of critical materials on the Bildungsroman, and on style and genre more broadly. We will also consider accounts of social and moral development as a way to think about the relationship between literature and historical change.

Senior Project Colloquium

Literature Senior Colloquium I
	Professor:	Marisa Libbon
	Course Number:		LIT 405		CRN Number:	10644	Class cap:	22	Credits:	1
	Schedule/Location:			Mon 3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 303
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
(To be taken concurrently with LIT 401) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers.

Literature Senior Colloquium II
	Professor:	Marisa Libbon
	Course Number:		LIT 406		CRN Number:	10645	Class cap:	26	Credits:	1
	Schedule/Location:			Mon 5:10 PM – 6:30 PM Olin 201
	Distributional Area:			LA Literary Analysis in English
(To be taken concurrently with LIT 402) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers.

Cross-listed Courses:

American Dreams
	Professor:	Hua Hsu
	Course Number:		AS 313		CRN Number:	10173	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue 3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303
	Distributional Area:			SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: Literature

Fiction and the Roman Empire
	Professor:	Robert Cioffi
	Course Number:		CLAS 318		CRN Number:	10131	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Tue 3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 307
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Literature

Women On Stage: Greek Tragedy and its Afterlife
	Professor:	Tyler Archer
	Course Number:		CLAS 319		CRN Number:	10132	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Thurs 3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 307
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Literature; Theater and Performance

Spanish Literature in Conversation with the Visual Arts
	Professor:	Patricia Lopez-Gay
	Course Number:		SPAN 301		CRN Number:	10165	Class cap:	15	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Mon Wed 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 301
	Distributional Area:			FL Foreign Languages and Lit
	Crosslists: Experimental Humanities; Latin American/Iberian Studies; Literature

Current Locations
	Professor:	Hua Hsu
	Course Number:		WRIT 377		CRN Number:	10358	Class cap:	12	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Wed 3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 302
	Distributional Area:			PA Practicing Arts
	Crosslists: Literature

Women on the Edge
	Professor:	Mary Caponegro
	Course Number:		WRIT 380		CRN Number:	10365	Class cap:	12	Credits:	4
	Schedule/Location:			Thurs 3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 200
	Distributional Area:			PA Practicing Arts
	Crosslists: Literature