Introduction to the Study of Poetry

Professor: Elizabeth Frank  

Course Number: LIT 123

CRN Number: 10262

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.

Supernatural Tales of Japan: Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins

Professor: Phuong Ngo  

Course Number: LIT 154

CRN Number: 10259

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Asian Studies

Since ancient times, humans have been fascinated with the otherworldly: stories of divine, ghostly, and fantastical beings regularly appear across various traditions and continue to serve as an endless source of inspiration for the creation of new art and literature. This course will introduce students to a variety of texts from the Japanese tradition that explore encounters between the ordinary and the strange. Topics include gender, sexuality, kinship, fear, abhorrence, and longing. The materials covered span a wide range of genres and time periods, starting with creation myths in the Kojiki and accounts of the otherworldly in the earliest texts of the written tradition, such as the Nihon ryōiki, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and The Tale of Genji, and ending with horror movies, novels, and comics in the modern period. Some questions we will attempt to answer are: What lies at the root of humanity’s perpetual fascination with the strange? How does the Japanese tradition differ from other traditions across time and space in its imaginations of sites of contest between the this-worldly and the other-worldly? What do these stories tell us about evolving social forms, codes, expectations, and the relationships among self, other, and community? All materials will be in English and no prior knowledge of Japanese is required.  This is a World Literature course offering.

How to Construct Meaning: Introduction to Chinese Narrative

Professor: Shuangting Xiong  

Course Number: LIT 156

CRN Number: 10260

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 120

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.

The Dean's Colloquium: Reading Charles Dickens

Professor: Deirdre D'Albertis  

Course Number: LIT 162

CRN Number: 10614

Class cap: 15

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Olin 201

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 long 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 Charles Dickens slowly, deliberately, and with attention to attention itself.  Our focus will be on two novels: Bleak House (1852-3) and Great Expectations (1861).  Originally published in serial form, each text presents us with questions of temporality and form.  How does a reader today navigate the complex multiplot structure of these extravagant fictional worlds? What challenges do we face in attending to narrators--Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Pip in Great Expectations--who are in many ways fundamentally unknown to themselves?  What is a plot, after all, and how might it both oppress and entice us as readers with expectations of our own? 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.

Hope in the Dark: Eurasian Fantasy and Folklore

Professor: Olga Voronina  

Course Number: LIT 164

CRN Number: 10261

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists: Russian and Eurasian Studies; Written Arts

Resisting totalitarian regimes takes not only courage, but imagination as well. This course explores the Eurasian nations’ responses to war, oppression, famine, epidemics, and exile through the oral tradition (epic narratives, fairy-tales, nursery rhymes, and popular jokes), along with the works of fantasy literature which often absorb, amalgamate, and recontextualize these genres. How can a pauper whose livelihood depends on nomad’s luck idolize and worship a horse? How can grandmother’s song save the world from destruction? Can two species form a union to give the future humanity its power and purpose? To people who need to find a refuge from danger and hardship, answers to these questions really matter. They lie in the ability of language to construct reality, as demonstrated by a variety of works, from the Kyrgyz epic poem Manas to Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novel Farewell, Gul’sary; from the fairy tales of the Bering Strait to Yuri Rytkheu’s rendering of the Chukchi foundational myth in “When the Whales Leave”; and from tales and lullabies that originated in Belarus, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, to Alindarka’s Children: Things Will be Bad by Alhierd Bacharevic – a recent fantasy of grief, frustration, horror, and all-conquering compassion. We will read these narratives as well as essays by Roman Jacobson, Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Vladimir Propp, Mieke Bal, and Cristina Bacchilega to contemplate the energy of defiance concealed in storytelling traditions across national borders and the millennia. We will also study heroic and trickster archetypes in modern renderings of classical mythology; analyze the politics of myth; and survey the mechanisms of domination and oppression that inspire such fantastical tropes as metamorphosis, magic helpers, and otherworldly journeys. Finally, in our attempt to understand what makes works of Eurasian folklore and fantasy so mesmerizing and full of hope we will endeavor to write both analytically and creatively on and around some of them, develop performative responses, and/or practice translation. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Narrative/Poetics/Representation

Professor: Alys Moody  

Course Number: LIT 201 A

CRN Number: 10346

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 301

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: Matthew Mutter  

Course Number: LIT 201 B

CRN Number: 10347

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 200

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: Daniel Williams  

Course Number: LIT 201 C

CRN Number: 10348

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 107

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.

Middlemarch: the Making of a Masterpiece

Professor: Stephen Graham  

Course Number: LIT 2005

CRN Number: 10381

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 306

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Victorian Studies

George Eliot's Middlemarch has long been widely considered to be among the greatest novels of all time; Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grownup people." We will read the eight books of Middlemarch slowly and intensively, over the course of the semester. We will trace the stages of conception, research, and composition of Middlemarch by consulting a selection of Eliot's personal letters, notebooks, and journals, forming, as best we can, an understanding of her mind and her process of literary creation.

Russian Laughter

Professor: Marina Kostalevsky  

Course Number: LIT 2117

CRN Number: 10383

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 206

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists: Russian and Eurasian Studies

A study of laughter and its manifestation in Russian literary tradition.  Issues to be discussed relate to such concepts and genres as romantic irony, social and political satire, literary parody, carnival, and the absurd.  We will examine how authors as distinct as Dostoevsky and Bulgakov create comic effects and utilize laughter for various artistic purposes.  We will also examine some of the major theories of laughter developed by Hobbs, Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin and others. Required readings  include the works of major Russian writers starting with the late-eighteenth-century satirical play by Denis Fonvisin and ending with Venedict Erofeev's underground cult masterpiece:  a contemplation on the life of a perpetually drunk philosopher in the former Soviet Union. Conducted in English.

Rethinking European Literature II: From Shakespeare to Modernism

Professor: Joseph Luzzi  

Course Number: LIT 219

CRN Number: 10373

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Hegeman 204

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

This course will immerse students in the remarkable literary inventions in Europe beginning in the early modern period and continuing into the 20th century. Covering a wealth of literary forms ranging from poetry, the essay, and the novel to drama, philosophy, and epistolary and experimental fiction, we will begin with the groundbreaking theatrical work of Shakespeare and the "invention" of the novel in Cervantes and conclude with the avant-garde Modernism of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In reflecting on the notion of "European literature," we will explore how later writers responded to cultural traditions forged in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods, while also charting the new artistic pathways that revealed their "rethinking" of the literary forms they inherited. A major concern will be on how the novel eventually became the preeminent literary genre, and how writers responded to – and often shaped – the major historical issues of their ages, including social unrest, religious upheaval, and political revolution. Texts will include Shakespeare's Othello, Cervantes', Don Quixote, Sor Juana's Letter to Sor Filotea, Voltaire''s Candide, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Austen's Persuasion, Manzoni's Betrothed, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse. While students are encouraged to take both semesters of Rethinking European Literature, they are also free to sign up for just one semester.

Stalin and Power

Professor: Jonathan Brent  

Course Number: LIT 2205

CRN Number: 10384

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Historical Studies; Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course will investigate Stalin's rise and seizure of absolute power and they way his power was reflected in society and Soviet literature. Through our readings of primary source materials, we will attempt to understand Stalin's actions from the inside; that is, from the point of view of the political, social, historical context in which he and other Bolsheviks saw themselves, rather than from the perspective of western historiography about them and their actions. What did they think they were doing? Why? What was Stalin's role in this process? How did he see that role? How central to the history of his rise to power was the Revolution of 1917? Did historical and cultural realities, both pre- and post-Revolution create an inescapable matrix of choices in which they found themselves? What choices did they have and why? In short, the question is: how did the catastrophic tragedy of the Great Terror of 1936-37, the Gulag system, and Stalin's assumption of absolute power happen and what did it mean for the great masses of Soviet/Russian citizens? Readings will concentrate on historical documents from Soviet political and governmental organs, including top secret and still classified KGB documents; novels; diaries; transcripts of conversations with Stalin; Stalin's personal letters; and contemporary reflections. Readings will include Vasily Grossman's great novel, Life and Fate; Walpurgis Night by Venedikt Erofeev; Sofia Petrovna, by Lidia Chukovskaya; along with other works that help us understanding the meaning and extent of Stalin's power and the way it shaped and was shaped by the life of the people.

Life in the Medieval Church

Professor: Karen Sullivan  

Course Number: LIT 2241

CRN Number: 10385

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Language Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians interpreted and reinterpreted the accounts of the lives of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the martyrs of the early Church and strove to imitate these lives in their own daily existence. In the course of this ever-renewed return to the sources, Christians struggled to adapt these early models of sanctity to a world radically different from that of their predecessors. Should one remove oneself from the corruption if the world or remain within it and attempt to reform it? Should one attach oneself to the wretched of the earth, sharing in their poverty and misery, or seek power in order to bring society into conformity with God's will? Should one study classical literature and philosophy, in the hope that they will strengthen one's faith, or avoid these fields, in the fear that they will weaken it? What should the role of women be in the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional fabric of Christianity? The history of the Church in the Middle Ages is largely the history of changing answers to these questions, as late antique models of sanctity give way to monasticism; as challenges to the Church arise both from within, in the form of the Gregorian and other reforms, and from without, in the form of heretical sects; as the mendicant orders, with their scholastic training, gain intellectual and, ultimately, political power within ecclesiastical institutions; and, finally, as practitioners of the anti-scholastic “modern devotion” (devotio moderna) come to prominence on the eve of the Renaissance. Readings will be drawn from biblical, patristic, Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan, and other sources.  This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

The Canterbury Tales

Professor: Marisa Libbon  

Course Number: LIT 2401

CRN Number: 10386

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Medieval Studies

What in the world can storytelling accomplish? This question drives Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and will likewise guide our semester-long exploration of it. An instant classic after Chaucer’s death in 1400, the Canterbury Tales inspired “fan fiction” almost immediately and has since been enshrined as an essential work within the English literary canon, counting writers from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot among its later readers and admirers. At odds with (or perhaps partly responsible for) its current “insider” and canonical status, though, is the fact that the Tales remains one of the most radically experimental works written in English. By turns beautiful and dirty, politically risky and calculatedly evasive, local and global, poetry and prose, the Tales tests, negotiates, and worries over the ways in which language—written, spoken, read, overheard—constructs reality. It challenges gender and class norms; queries and queers the relationship between tale and teller; and calls into question institutional authority and social hierarchy. Following Chaucer’s lead, we’ll grapple with how literature does (and sometimes does not) influence social change. Put otherwise, what’s the point of telling stories?  This course counts as pre-1800 offering.

Palestinian Literature in Translation

Professor: Elizabeth Holt  

Course Number: LIT 245

CRN Number: 10370

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 208

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit    

This course is a survey of Palestinian literature, from the early Arabic press in Palestine to contemporary Palestinian fiction.  We will read short stories, poetry and novels by authors including Adania Shibli, Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Samira 'Azzam, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish, Sahar Khalifeh, Fedwa Tuqan, and Elias Khoury.  All literary texts will be read in translation. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

Arthurian Romance

Professor: Karen Sullivan  

Course Number: LIT 249

CRN Number: 10380

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will be studying the major works of the Arthurian tradition, from the early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur; to the French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Merlin and Morgan, and the Holy Grail; to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century reimaginings of these legends. Throughout its history, Arthurian literature has been criticized for the effects it has upon its readers. The alternate world presented by these texts—with their knights errant, beautiful princesses, marvelous animals, enchanted forests, and decentralized geography—can seem more attractive than our own mundane world, and, in doing so, it is feared, can distract us from this world and our responsibilities within it. Over the semester, as we chart the birth and growth of Arthurian romance, we will be considering the uncertain moral status of this genre and its consequences for us today. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Shakespeare

Professor: Adhaar Desai  

Course Number: LIT 2501

CRN Number: 10382

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 100

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Before William Shakespeare was ever an icon, an industry, or required reading in high schools throughout the world, he was merely one of dozens of poets and playwrights working in London around the turn of the seventeenth century. This course attempts to recover an unfiltered view of Shakespeare's works by thinking of him as a writer who paid close attention to the world around him, cobbled ideas from other writers together, and consciously experimented with the limits of what it is possible to communicate through writing and performance. We will discover how Shakespeare's works are embedded in theatrical and literary traditions, how they fit into a context undergoing tremendous social, political, artistic, and intellectual upheaval, and why they still resonate with so many people today. Through careful investigations of Shakespeare's techniques, we will also discover how he engages philosophical and social issues relating to politics, sexuality, gender, and race that remain pressing. The class will cover representative texts that span Shakespeare's career, including *Richard III,* *A Midsummer Night's Dream,* *The Merchant of Venice,* *Coriolanus,* and *The Winter's Tale.* Open to all students. This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Asian/American Lives

Professor: Hua Hsu  

Course Number: LIT 256

CRN Number: 10263

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Asian Studies

For over fifty years there has existed something called the “Asian American.” The term was the modest contribution of a community of Asian students in California’s Bay Area who had been inspired by the self-fashioning initiative of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Ignoring the arbitrariness and historical divisions implicit in the term “Asian”—and defiantly rejecting longstanding terms of derision such as “Oriental” or “Asiatic”—these students conceived of the Asian American as a new (and newly empowered) citizen, and the moment itself represented a turning point in the history of Asians living in the United States. The decades since have brought confusion—albeit a productive kind of confusion. Nowhere have the parameters of Asian American identity been contested more thoroughly than in discussions of literature. During this semester-long course, we will conduct a survey of the literary works produced by Asians in the United States, from poetry carved on the walls of immigration detention centers and travel reportage to experimental fiction, film, graphic novels, zines and memoir. Throughout this course, we will also pay close attention to how different generations of Asian Americans have negotiated their own racialization, the slippery qualities of this category of identification—even those who wrote before the category existed. We will pursue twin narratives: one which accepts these texts as acts of imagination and aspiration, experience and experimentation; and the other tracing the subtler lines of criticism and self-revision implicit to a body of literature encircled by such fraught boundaries.

Marx as Literature

Professor: Alys Moody  

Course Number: LIT 261

CRN Number: 10371

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: German Studies; Politics

Karl Marx's magnum opus, Capital, is both a tremendously influential theory of the world we live in today and a famously strange text. Wildly interdisciplinary, it combines genres, styles, and methods in order to develop a multifaceted account of the structures and operation of capitalism. In this course, we will slowly and carefully read volume 1 of Capital in its entirety, with a literary critical eye for understanding how questions of form, style and genre shape this transformative and influential account of the modern world. Students will be encouraged through assessment and class discussion to develop their own direct engagement with this work, finding their bearings not in generalized preconceptions about Marxism or communism, but in close, faithful, and creative engagement with the text itself. This in turn will offer the basis for a reading of Marx that is able to explore and test his ideas in our own world. We will consider how Marx understands capitalism to produce injustice and inequality, and what he has to say about the class structure of our society. No previous knowledge of Marx, Marxism, or Capital is expected and both Literature and non-Literature students are welcome.

The Power of Feeling: Black Music, Literature and the Creation of an Aesthetic

Professor: Donna Grover Marcus Roberts

Course Number: LIT 264

CRN Number: 10568

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Music

This course asks this question: in what ways is an aesthetic a response to the conditions of the time?  For enslaved people spirituals detailed a transitory experience marked by suffering that culminated in a celebratory experience of freedom or ascendance into heaven.  While the blues narrated the cost of personal autonomy through songs filled with love, anger, hurt and the celebration of survival.  Jazz takes from both of these forms in order to detail the experience of newly formed  communities  and mediate the divergent cultures that sought out opportunity in urban areas.  Literature shares a symbiotic relationship to these musical movements detailing social and political upheavals  that also contribute to an aesthetic.   By  reading such literary artists such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin along side notable musical artists such as Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, we will not only understand  conditions and the aesthetics  they joined to create but will also confront our present political, social and artistic situation and how that is mirrored in our current consumption and creation of art.

The Land of Disasters: A Cultural History of Catastrophic 'Japan'

Professor: Chiara Pavone  

Course Number: LIT 267

CRN Number: 10362

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Experimental Humanities

In a famous speech given shortly after the occurrence of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster in 2011, writer Murakami Haruki affirmed that "To be Japanese means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes." This course's main objective will be to explore and dispute the origins and genealogy of this – widespread and undisputed – claim. Each class will introduce literary works and media tracing Japan's history of natural and man-made disasters, explore different methodologies in disaster research (including disaster anthropology, sociology, post-colonial theory and ecocriticism), and engage critically with issues shaping the perception and representation of disasters – such as the proximity of narrators and narratees to the epicenter of the catastrophe, minority populations' vulnerability to hazards and systemic discrimination, authority and biases in the process of memorialization. The course will offer some critical instruments to answer the question through the close reading of literary works, films and visual artifacts; and by situating these pieces in a larger cultural and technological history that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Japanese nation.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Reading Youth in Korean Film and Literature

Professor: Soonyoung Lee  

Course Number: LIT 275

CRN Number: 10372

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Asian Studies

This comprehensive course delves into the multifaceted representations of youth in Korean society, spanning from the colonial era to contemporary times. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates literature, film, and popular culture, we examine the significant role that the concept of "youth" has played in shaping modern Korean history. We will unpack how various historical and social forces have contributed to the construction of "youth" as a cultural and social category. Special attention will be given to the interplay between gender and these constructions, exploring how they influence and are reflected in diverse youth cultures. By engaging with a range of intersectional cultural contexts—including music, media, literature, and film—students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complexities that shape youth identities and cultures in Korea.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Like Family: Domestic Worker Characters in Fiction

Professor: Marina van Zuylen  

Course Number: LIT 282

CRN Number: 10377

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Human Rights

This course will delve into the idea that female domestic workers (maids, nannies, cooks), often portrayed as invisible and powerless, can also wield considerable influence and authority over their employers, affecting the structure of everyday life. Far from only being consigned to the margins of storytelling, mere backdrop to the narrative, our examples will show these workers in different light. Starting with excerpts from the comedic tradition where the "servant" uses role reversals to subvert traditional social hierarchies (Terence, Cervantes, Molière, Kundera), we will then tackle the ethical and social implications of figures that are both part of and excluded from the household. Self-destructive loyalty (Flaubert, A Simple Heart, Ishiguro, Remains of the Day), skewed hierarchies (Szabo, The Door, du Maurier, Rebecca), Class warfare (NDiaye, The Cheffe, Slimani, The Perfect Nanny), cultural upheavals (Faizur Rasul, Bengal to Birmingham). This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Kafka & Brecht: Myth & Theater

Professor: Thomas Bartscherer  

Course Number: LIT 283

CRN Number: 10378

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: German Studies

What is distinctive about modern storytelling? If it differs in important ways from earlier modes of storytelling, why is that? Has human nature changed? Has the world changed? Both, or neither? In this course, we will consider these and related questions by closely studying selected works from two of the greatest 20th century storytellers: Franz Kafka, a writer of prose fiction, and Berthold Brecht, primarily a playwright and director. Kafka was, in the words of Walter Benjamin, "a latter-day Ulysses" whose "real genius was that he tried something entirely new." Brecht, meanwhile, was in his own words working toward "a radical transformation of the theatre," a rejection of the "dramatic" in favor of the "epic" theater. We will consider how both writers revisit and radically re-imagine central figures and forms in the long arc of literary history. We will follow their tracks, also reading key selections from Greek and Hebrew literature. How do Kafka's Poseidon and Prometheus compare to those we find in Homer and in later version of these myths? Why are Kafka's Sirens silent? Why does Brecht advocate for "non-Aristotelian" drama and does he realize this vision in plays like The Mother and Mother Courage? How does his Antigone differ from her ancient Greek predecessor? All texts will be in English. Some readings will be paired with film screenings and, if possible, attendance at a staged production or reading.

T.S. Eliot: The Poetics of Modernity

Professor: Matthew Mutter  

Course Number: LIT 3147

CRN Number: 10393

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies

This course will use the poetry, philosophy, and cultural criticism of T.S. Eliot as a framework for exploring the multiple intellectual challenges of modernity. We will begin by investigating the cultural contexts out of which literary modernism arose—the crisis of liberal progressivism in the wake of WWI, the exhaustion of Romanticism and philosophical Idealism, the fragmentation of social norms and the experience of anomie and ennui—as well as specific influences on Eliot’s early work (Baudelaire, Laforgue, Pound, Santayana, Freud, and Durkheim). With steady attention to his interlocutors, we will trace the development of Eliot’s poetic and philosophical project from the radical critique of modern epistemology in his dissertation to his later contemplative poems and plays. Along the way we will explore the ongoing tensions Eliot strived to negotiate: tradition v. poetic innovation and a comprehensive philosophical skepticism; the desire for psychological and cultural integration v. the acknowledgement of fragmentation; and a sustained attraction to (and profound knowledge of) the religious ideas of the East v. his immersion in Christian mysticism. The course will also aim to understand Eliot’s remarkable self-revisions throughout his career and the vagaries of Eliot’s reputation as a critic and poet in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hannah Arendt: Reading The Human Condition and the Plurality of Languages

Professor: Thomas Wild  

Course Number: LIT 318

CRN Number: 10391

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: German Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy

This seminar will be centered on a detailed exploration of Hannah Arendt's pivotal work The Human Condition. We will close-read Arendt's book and discuss her re-thinking of the political and its languages, which is carried by reflections on phenomena and concepts such as action, speech, power, plurality, freedom, world, labor, work, the private and the public sphere. Activating a driving trope of Arendt's book – "to think what we are doing" – we will have an equally close look at how The Human Condition is crafted, i.e. at its poetics. Arendt's deliberations were written in conversation with philosophers, political thinkers and poets ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine over Marx, Montesquieu, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Faukner, Rilke, and Kafka. Our inquiry will look at a variety of scholarly and artistic responses to Arendt's work. And we will refine our scrutiny by branching out into further writings by Arendt concerned with issues related to The Human Condition, such as her essays On Violence, Truth and Politics, Thinking and Moral Considerations, and on poetic thinkers like Lessing, Benjamin, and Auden. Reading Hannah Arendt's plurality of languages, as we will explore, means not only to address the multi-lingual fabric of her texts, but also the diverse modes and tones in which her critical writing encourages us to think about the task of responding to the political and intellectual challenge of tyranny and totalitarianism – then and today.

Love and Death in Dante

Professor: Joseph Luzzi  

Course Number: LIT 3205

CRN Number: 10394

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 305

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.

Climate Fiction

Professor: Daniel Williams  

Course Number: LIT 3251

CRN Number: 10395

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 206

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? How has our urgent ecological crisis shaped the scales, genres, and plots of contemporary fiction? This course surveys the literary genre that has lately come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, we will consider realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. Regions may include the United States, Europe, West Africa, and India; authors may include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, Amitav Ghosh, and Ian McEwan. We will examine how literature engages (or not) central concepts in earth-system science and scenarios of ecological calamity (hurricanes, megafires, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss); how it critiques (or not) environmental racism and injustice; and how it envisions possible futures for humanity in the Anthropocene. Reading critical materials from across the environmental humanities, we will also think about the challenges of narrative, representation, sympathy, and imagination as they apply to literature and climate policy. The course will emphasize methods of research, writing, and revision essential for Senior Projects in literature and other humanities fields. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Race and Real Estate

Professor: Peter L'Official  

Course Number: LIT 328

CRN Number: 10387

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban 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. 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. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

Solidarity with the Nonhuman: Poetry as Coexistence

Professor: Cole Heinowitz  

Course Number: LIT 3330

CRN Number: 10396

Class cap: 17

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Human Rights

How do you write about what you do not, and cannot, rationally know? How can poetry address the presence of the nonhuman in the world and in ourselves? What kind of psychic and political orientation emerges from the acknowledgment that no rigid, stable boundary separates humans from other organisms and objects—that human existence is necessarily a coexistence with the nonhuman? Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, these questions became a focal point for innovative thinking about poetics; since that time, their urgency has only intensified. Our study in this course charts the compositional practices (e.g. attunement, dictation, and somatics) by which experimental writers from the eighteenth century to the present have approached and sought to encounter the nonhuman in language. Readings will include works by Diderot, Edward Young, Goethe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Ruskin, Yeats, H.D., Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, Alejandra Pizarnik, Hannah Weiner, and C.A. Conrad.

Fantastika and the New Gothic

Professor: Bradford Morrow  

Course Number: LIT 334

CRN Number: 10392

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. Several authors will join us in person and via Zoom to discuss their work with the class.

Transpacific Crossings

Professor: Hua Hsu  

Course Number: LIT 364

CRN Number: 10390

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies

This seminar theorizes the transpacific, a figurative space between the United States and Asia where ideas, images and anxieties of identity (national and racial), modernity, and nationhood circulate. The course draws from an array of sources: from classics of the American canon to experimental poetry to modern Asian American memoir. How did anxieties around Pacific trade and exploration shade classics of the American canon? How have contemporary writers sought to reconcile historical rupture or dislocation through formal experimentation? What happens when Asian American writers seek an imagined, ancestral "home"--and what frictions emerge when American notions of racial difference drift beyond these borders? What explains the special place of Asia in the West's speculative visions of the future? Possible authors include: Karen Tei Yamashita, Nam Le, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ruth Ozeki, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Bad Art: On Amateurs, Hacks, Sellouts, and Robots

Professor: Adhaar Desai  

Course Number: LIT 365

CRN Number: 10389

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists:

Written Arts

On what grounds may someone responsibly declare that a work of literature is mediocre, mid, trash, or simply not worth one's time? In what ways does it make sense to judge artwork by a generative AI differently than artwork we know to be by human beings? This course interrogates the ethics and practices of critical judgment by studying theoretical concepts like the sublime, the mediocre, the gimmick, and the hack. As we read influential theoretical texts by writers like Longinus, Fanon, Bourdieu, and Ngai, we will also tackle aesthetically challenging works that reflect upon artistic cultural production like William Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream,* Helen Dewitt's *The Last Samurai,* and Percival Everett's *Erasure.* We will also consider an array of poetry, short fiction, and professional criticism of varying quality (we will, unfortunately, have to confront some supposedly bad art). Students will be challenged to compose responsible aesthetic criticism and also to develop a research project that critically engages an aesthetic problem of their choosing. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction

Professor: Ursula Embola  

Course Number: LIT 369

CRN Number: 10388

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice  

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights

"Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction" is a reading-intensive course that introduces students to contemporary texts in English translation penned by award-winning Cameroonian-American author Patrice Nganang. Students taking this course will develop an appreciation of the historical, cultural, thematic, and aesthetic preoccupations expressed within Nganang's trilogy of historical fiction novels centered on Cameroon's development into a West/Central African nation over the course of the 20th century. A key question that sits at the heart of this course is the following: "How is the literary genre of historical fiction employed by Nganang in the work of crafting a Cameroonian national identity, and how is that work complicated by the specificity of the Cameroonian multicultural, multilingual, and postcolonial situation?" The course seeks to use Literature as a means of decolonizing African history and is designed to provide students with exciting and challenging new learning experiences which they can easily apply to other areas of their academic journeys. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Reading Emily Dickinson

Professor: Philip Pardi  

Course Number: LIT 379

CRN Number: 10294

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   10:30 AM - 4:30 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Experimentlal Humanities; Written Arts

Although frequently depicted as living and working in isolation, Emily Dickinson was vitally connected to the world around her. In this class, we will immerse ourselves in Dickinson’s writing, in the writers she was drawn to, and in the historical moment of which she was a part. By exploring how her work participates in the poetic practices and intellectual currents of her day, we will sharpen our understanding of her unique, even radical, contribution to American poetry. Along the way, we will consider Dickinson as a reader (of Emerson, the Psalms, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and periodicals delivering news of the Civil War, for example) as well as her influence on poets who have read and responded to her (Adrienne Rich, Lorine Niedecker, Camille Dungy, and Rae Armantrout, to name a few). And as we read our way into Dickinson’s world, we will also take up the question of reading itself: What does it mean to read a poem “closely” and what kind(s) of attention does the act of reading require of us? What happens in the brain when we read and how can we enrich or deepen the experience? Note on Course Format: This course meets once a week for six hours. At the beginning of each session, we will turn off our phones (and laptops, smart watches, etc.) and be completely offline for the duration of the class. This will allow us to explore our existing habits as readers and to experiment with new ones. (Students who have concerns about the format of the course should contact the professor before registration.)

Supernatural Tales of Japan: Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins

Professor: Phuong Ngo  

Course Number: LIT 154

CRN Number: 10259

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Asian Studies

Since ancient times, humans have been fascinated with the otherworldly: stories of divine, ghostly, and fantastical beings regularly appear across various traditions and continue to serve as an endless source of inspiration for the creation of new art and literature. This course will introduce students to a variety of texts from the Japanese tradition that explore encounters between the ordinary and the strange. Topics include gender, sexuality, kinship, fear, abhorrence, and longing. The materials covered span a wide range of genres and time periods, starting with creation myths in the Kojiki and accounts of the otherworldly in the earliest texts of the written tradition, such as the Nihon ryōiki, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and The Tale of Genji, and ending with horror movies, novels, and comics in the modern period. Some questions we will attempt to answer are: What lies at the root of humanity’s perpetual fascination with the strange? How does the Japanese tradition differ from other traditions across time and space in its imaginations of sites of contest between the this-worldly and the other-worldly? What do these stories tell us about evolving social forms, codes, expectations, and the relationships among self, other, and community? All materials will be in English and no prior knowledge of Japanese is required.  This is a World Literature course offering.

How to Construct Meaning: Introduction to Chinese Narrative

Professor: Shuangting Xiong  

Course Number: LIT 156

CRN Number: 10260

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 120

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.

Hope in the Dark: Eurasian Fantasy and Folklore

Professor: Olga Voronina  

Course Number: LIT 164

CRN Number: 10261

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Human Rights; Russian and Eurasian Studies; Written Arts

Resisting totalitarian regimes takes not only courage, but imagination as well. This course explores the Eurasian nations’ responses to war, oppression, famine, epidemics, and exile through the oral tradition (epic narratives, fairy-tales, nursery rhymes, and popular jokes), along with the works of fantasy literature which often absorb, amalgamate, and recontextualize these genres. How can a pauper whose livelihood depends on nomad’s luck idolize and worship a horse? How can grandmother’s song save the world from destruction? Can two species form a union to give the future humanity its power and purpose? To people who need to find a refuge from danger and hardship, answers to these questions really matter. They lie in the ability of language to construct reality, as demonstrated by a variety of works, from the Kyrgyz epic poem Manas to Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novel Farewell, Gul’sary; from the fairy tales of the Bering Strait to Yuri Rytkheu’s rendering of the Chukchi foundational myth in “When the Whales Leave”; and from tales and lullabies that originated in Belarus, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, to Alindarka’s Children: Things Will be Bad by Alhierd Bacharevic – a recent fantasy of grief, frustration, horror, and all-conquering compassion. We will read these narratives as well as essays by Roman Jacobson, Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Vladimir Propp, Mieke Bal, and Cristina Bacchilega to contemplate the energy of defiance concealed in storytelling traditions across national borders and the millennia. We will also study heroic and trickster archetypes in modern renderings of classical mythology; analyze the politics of myth; and survey the mechanisms of domination and oppression that inspire such fantastical tropes as metamorphosis, magic helpers, and otherworldly journeys. Finally, in our attempt to understand what makes works of Eurasian folklore and fantasy so mesmerizing and full of hope we will endeavor to write both analytically and creatively on and around some of them, develop performative responses, and/or practice translation. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

The Land of Disasters: A Cultural History of Catastrophic 'Japan'

Professor: Chiara Pavone  

Course Number: LIT 267

CRN Number: 10362

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities

In a famous speech given shortly after the occurrence of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster in 2011, writer Murakami Haruki affirmed that "To be Japanese means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes." This course's main objective will be to explore and dispute the origins and genealogy of this – widespread and undisputed – claim. Each class will introduce literary works and media tracing Japan's history of natural and man-made disasters, explore different methodologies in disaster research (including disaster anthropology, sociology, post-colonial theory and ecocriticism), and engage critically with issues shaping the perception and representation of disasters – such as the proximity of narrators and narratees to the epicenter of the catastrophe, minority populations' vulnerability to hazards and systemic discrimination, authority and biases in the process of memorialization. The course will offer some critical instruments to answer the question through the close reading of literary works, films and visual artifacts; and by situating these pieces in a larger cultural and technological history that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Japanese nation.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Palestinian Literature in Translation

Professor: Elizabeth Holt  

Course Number: LIT 245

CRN Number: 10370

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

This course is a survey of Palestinian literature, from the early Arabic press in Palestine to contemporary Palestinian fiction.  We will read short stories, poetry and novels by authors including Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Samira 'Azzam, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish, Sahar Khalifeh, Fedwa Tuqan, and Elias Khoury.  All literary texts will be read in translation. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

Reading Youth in Korean Film and Literature

Professor: Soonyoung Lee  

Course Number: LIT 275

CRN Number: 10372

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Asian Studies

This comprehensive course delves into the multifaceted representations of youth in Korean society, spanning from the colonial era to contemporary times. Through an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates literature, film, and popular culture, we examine the significant role that the concept of "youth" has played in shaping modern Korean history. We will unpack how various historical and social forces have contributed to the construction of "youth" as a cultural and social category. Special attention will be given to the interplay between gender and these constructions, exploring how they influence and are reflected in diverse youth cultures. By engaging with a range of intersectional cultural contexts—including music, media, literature, and film—students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complexities that shape youth identities and cultures in Korea.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Like Family: Domestic Worker Characters in Fiction

Professor: Marina van Zuylen  

Course Number: LIT 282

CRN Number: 10377

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Human Rights

This course will delve into the idea that female domestic workers (maids, nannies, cooks), often portrayed as invisible and powerless, can also wield considerable influence and authority over their employers, affecting the structure of everyday life. Far from only being consigned to the margins of storytelling, mere backdrop to the narrative, our examples will show these workers in different light. Starting with excerpts from the comedic tradition where the "servant" uses role reversals to subvert traditional social hierarchies (Terence, Cervantes, Molière, Kundera), we will then tackle the ethical and social implications of figures that are both part of and excluded from the household. Self-destructive loyalty (Flaubert, A Simple Heart, Ishiguro, Remains of the Day), skewed hierarchies (Szabo, The Door, du Maurier, Rebecca), Class warfare (NDiaye, The Cheffe, Slimani, The Perfect Nanny), cultural upheavals (Faizur Rasul, Bengal to Birmingham). This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Light Writing: Literature and Photography in the French Tradition

Professor: Gabriella Lindsay  

Course Number: LIT 285

CRN Number: 10379

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities; French Studies

What happens when photographs and texts are brought together? In the French-speaking world, there is a particularly strong tradition of writers and artists using photographic images and text to create new forms of meaning, unsurprising perhaps, given French claims on the invention of a photographic process in the early 19th century. This seminar will consider the relationship between literature and photography by engaging closely with photo-textual and theoretical works translated from French, focusing on the themes of autobiography, historical memory and postcoloniality. We will examine questions of documentation, experimentation, selfhood, violence, colonialism, memory and forgetting, perception, ethics, and the nature of representation. From Sophie Calle and Hervé Guibert's photobiographical blurring of fiction and reality to Malek Alloula's "album" of Algerian colonial postcards and Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi's photo-poetic history of Guianan work-camps, we will think about how words and photographic images transform one another to create new understandings of the self, individual and collective memory, loss and history. Students will also have the opportunity to make photo-texts of their own. Authors to be studied may include Roland Barthes, Sophie Calle, Marie NDiaye, Hervé Guibert, Hélène Cixous, Malek Alloula, Patrick Modiano, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rodolphe Hammadi, Marc Garanger, Leïla Sebbar. This course is conducted in English and does not assume any prior knowledge of French, photography, or literature in French. This course fulfills the World Literature requirement. By engaging with the representation of colonial violence and colonial memory, the class also counts for the Difference and Justice distributional area.

Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction

Professor: Ursula Embola  

Course Number: LIT 369

CRN Number: 10388

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Human Rights

"Radical Reading: Nganang's Historical Fiction" is a reading-intensive course that introduces students to contemporary texts in English translation penned by award-winning Cameroonian-American author Patrice Nganang. Students taking this course will develop an appreciation of the historical, cultural, thematic, and aesthetic preoccupations expressed within Nganang's trilogy of historical fiction novels centered on Cameroon's development into a West/Central African nation over the course of the 20th century. A key question that sits at the heart of this course is the following: "How is the literary genre of historical fiction employed by Nganang in the work of crafting a Cameroonian national identity, and how is that work complicated by the specificity of the Cameroonian multicultural, multilingual, and postcolonial situation?" The course seeks to use Literature as a means of decolonizing African history and is designed to provide students with exciting and challenging new learning experiences which they can easily apply to other areas of their academic journeys. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Life in the Medieval Church

Professor: Karen Sullivan  

Course Number: LIT 2241

CRN Number: 10385

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Language Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians interpreted and reinterpreted the accounts of the lives of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the martyrs of the early Church and strove to imitate these lives in their own daily existence. In the course of this ever-renewed return to the sources, Christians struggled to adapt these early models of sanctity to a world radically different from that of their predecessors. Should one remove oneself from the corruption if the world or remain within it and attempt to reform it? Should one attach oneself to the wretched of the earth, sharing in their poverty and misery, or seek power in order to bring society into conformity with God's will? Should one study classical literature and philosophy, in the hope that they will strengthen one's faith, or avoid these fields, in the fear that they will weaken it? What should the role of women be in the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional fabric of Christianity? The history of the Church in the Middle Ages is largely the history of changing answers to these questions, as late antique models of sanctity give way to monasticism; as challenges to the Church arise both from within, in the form of the Gregorian and other reforms, and from without, in the form of heretical sects; as the mendicant orders, with their scholastic training, gain intellectual and, ultimately, political power within ecclesiastical institutions; and, finally, as practitioners of the anti-scholastic “modern devotion” (devotio moderna) come to prominence on the eve of the Renaissance. Readings will be drawn from biblical, patristic, Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan, and other sources.  This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Arthurian Romance

Professor: Karen Sullivan  

Course Number: LIT 249

CRN Number: 10380

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will be studying the major works of the Arthurian tradition, from the early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur; to the Welsh Mabinogion; to the French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Merlin and Morgan, and the Quest for the Holy Grail; to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Throughout its history, Arthurian literature has been criticized for the effects it has upon its readers. The alternate world presented by these texts—with their knights errant, beautiful princesses, marvelous animals, enchanted forests, and decentralized geography—can seem more attractive than our own mundane world, and, in doing so, it is feared, can distract us from this world and our responsibilities within it. Over the semester, as we chart the birth and growth of Arthurian romance, we will be considering the uncertain moral status of this genre and its consequences for us today.  This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

The Canterbury Tales

Professor: Marisa Libbon  

Course Number: LIT 2401

CRN Number: 10386

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: Medieval Studies

What in the world can storytelling accomplish? This question drives Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and will likewise guide our semester-long exploration of it. An instant classic after Chaucer’s death in 1400, the Canterbury Tales inspired “fan fiction” almost immediately and has since been enshrined as an essential work within the English literary canon, counting writers from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot among its later readers and admirers. At odds with (or perhaps partly responsible for) its current “insider” and canonical status, though, is the fact that the Tales remains one of the most radically experimental works written in English. By turns beautiful and dirty, politically risky and calculatedly evasive, local and global, poetry and prose, the Tales tests, negotiates, and worries over the ways in which language—written, spoken, read, overheard—constructs reality. It challenges gender and class norms; queries and queers the relationship between tale and teller; and calls into question institutional authority and social hierarchy. Following Chaucer’s lead, we’ll grapple with how literature does (and sometimes does not) influence social change. Put otherwise, what’s the point of telling stories?  This course counts as pre-1800 offering.

Race and Real Estate

Professor: Peter L'Official  

Course Number: LIT 328

CRN Number: 10387

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban 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. 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. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

Bad Art: On Amateurs, Hacks, Sellouts, and Robots

Professor: Adhaar Desai  

Course Number: LIT 365

CRN Number: 10389

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

On what grounds may someone responsibly declare that a work of literature is mediocre, mid, trash, or simply not worth one's time? In what ways does it make sense to judge artwork by a generative AI differently than artwork we know to be by human beings? This course interrogates the ethics and practices of critical judgment by studying theoretical concepts like the sublime, the mediocre, the merely interesting, and the hack. As we read influential theoretical texts by writers like Longinus, Benjamin, Fanon, Sontag, and Ngai, we will also tackle aesthetically challenging works that reflect upon artistic cultural production like William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai, and Percival Everett's Erasure. Students will be challenged to compose responsible aesthetic criticism of texts of their own choosing while also developing a research project related to one of the course's major readings.  This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Climate Fiction

Professor: Daniel Williams  

Course Number: LIT 3251

CRN Number: 10395

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location: