Pre-Moderation Required Course: Narrative / Poetics Representation

 

Narrative/Poetics/Representation
	Course Number: LIT 201 A			CRN Number: 90302	Class cap: 15	Credits: 4
	Professor:	Stephen Graham
	Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 307
	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
	Course Number: LIT 201 B			CRN Number: 90303	Class cap: 15	Credits: 4
	Professor:	Ingrid Becker
	Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 310
	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.

Literature Sequence Courses: Historical studies in the Comparative, English, and American Literature traditions. One sequence course is required before moderation. Sequence courses have no prerequisites and are open to students at all levels.

 

Comparative Literature I: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
	Course Number: LIT 204A			CRN Number: 90304	Class cap: 22	Credits: 4
	Professor:	Karen Sullivan
	Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Aspinwall 302
	Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Medieval Studies

This course constitutes a survey of the masterworks of medieval and Renaissance European literature. It was during this time period that the concept of the author, as we now conceive of it, first emerged. When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? How does our assumption of who the author is affect how our reading of the text? We will be keeping these questions in mind as we examine the shift from epic to lyric and romance; from orally-based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, The Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies.

 

Comparative Literature II: Dreamers and Disruptors: The Birth of Modern European Literature
	Course Number: LIT 204B			CRN Number: 90305	Class cap: 22	Credits: 4
	Professor:	Joseph Luzzi
	Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 306
	Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English

This course will immerse students in the remarkable literature in Europe from roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. We will cover a wide range of forms (poetry, prose, theater) and movements (Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic) as we focus on groundbreaking authors like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Manzoni, and many more. A major concern will be on how the novel eventually became the preeminent literary genre, and how writers of this vast period responded to – and often shaped – the massive sociopolitical and historical issues of their ages. Overall we will see how the very idea of “literature” in our modern, contemporary sense was created during this epoch of astonishing literary achievement.

 

American Literature I: Amazing Grace: The Puritan Legacy in American Literature and Culture
	Course Number: LIT 257			CRN Number: 90307	Class cap: 22	Credits: 4
	Professor:	Elizabeth Frank
	Schedule/Location:		Wed Thurs    8:30 AM – 9:50 AM Olin 202
	Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
	Crosslists: American Studies; Study of Religions

Starting in 1620, Puritans dissenting from the Church of England escaped persecution by setting out for New England accompanied by their strict Calvinist theology and the dream of a Christian “city on a hill.”  But from the beginning, they wrestled with contradictions in their expectations, religious customs and ways of life that have never been resolved and that, to this day, both enrich and bedevil American society.

How can the same religious culture notorious for its theocratic rigidity and persecuting intolerance have also become inadvertently the seedbed for democratic principles, reverence for the individual and the primacy of conscience?  How can those who subscribed to John Winthrop’s lay sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, with its message of loving mutual interdependence, kill Indigenous peoples with impunity and lay arrogant claim to “empty” land to which they felt entitled as God’s chosen people? How could those whose writings gave birth to the rich and labyrinthine interiority of the American “self,” who prized literacy and learning and produced the first generation of American intellectuals, insist on theological and social conformity on pain of criminalizing non-compliance?  How could they persecute Quakers and Anabaptists? How could they hang “witches”?

Central to Puritan practice was the Bible, the constant reading and discussion of which was the cornerstone of every aspect of day-in-day-out Puritan life. So, we will be reading the Bible, both the Old (Hebrew) Testament and the New (Greek) Testament, along with texts from such essential Puritan literary genres as sermons, histories, diaries, spiritual autobiographies and poems, encountering as we do so some of our first major American writers: William Bradford, Thomas Hooker, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. We will consider those aspects of Puritanism aligned with Renaissance humanism, with its emphasis on the role of “experience” and proto-scientific “evidence” in the quest for grace, and the Puritan relationship with emerging Enlightenment secularism and American capitalism.

The question of dissent and its costs, in particular the Antinomian heresy, arises with the brilliant Anne Hutchinson, midwife and outspoken thinker, whose trial for daring to take responsibility for her own salvation we will follow in transcript. We will look as well at that tireless gadfly Roger Williams, to whom we owe so much for the concept of the separation of church and state, and for his pioneering work with Native Americans and their languages. We will look as well at the Salem witch trials in 1692 by reading both the formidable and unintentionally bathetic Cotton Mather (The Wonders of the Invisible World) and the twentieth-century intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter’s great essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

In the poems of Anne Bradstreet and the diary of Samuel Sewall, we will find glimpses of daily life, courtship, marriage and the Puritan view of sexuality (it was NOT “Puritanical!). Reading Jonathan Edwards, we will look at the first Great Awakening as the beginning of the end of Puritan orthodoxy and the harbinger of its eventual transformation into American Evangelicalism’s explosive and unstoppable rise, which for us will include the development of the Black church in America, gospel music and readings in James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thus we will try to make sense of the paradoxes in American Puritanism—“the defects of its virtues and the virtues of its defects”–while also working to understand and respect the passionate religious experience for which the Puritans thirsted.  In exploring such concepts as the covenant, original sin, guilt, grace and the elect, we will read fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne that imaginatively reconstructs the Puritan past; we’ll look at the line that goes from Thomas Hooker’s magnificent “A True Sight of Sin” right up to Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe and beyond, to American “noir” in fiction and film. We will further trace the transformation of these concepts as they resurface in what is perhaps the Puritans’ greatest legacy: radical American individualism embedded in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson—and in the principled and conscience-driven actions of abolitionists John Brown, freedom fighters in the Civil Rights movement, conscientious objectors and antiwar resisters in the 1960s and beyond.

Listed as a Difference and Justice course, and with Hate Studies, our work together will pay very careful attention to the problematic and shameful legacy of Puritan mistreatment (with rare exceptions) of Indigenous peoples in New England and the unquestioned assumptions that made such mistreatment possible.