100-Level Literature Courses
Course: |
LIT 138 Writing While Black |
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Professor: |
Peter L'Official |
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CRN: |
90258 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin
305 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies; Human Rights
This is a course on African American Literature in the 21st Century. In
this class, we will explore what it means for an author in the contemporary era
to render Blackness, Black folk, and Black experience in prose and poetry. How
do Black writers contend with the present, bearing in mind the notion that
"the past is never dead. It's not even past"? What does it mean to
write in a moment—like many before it--when simply "existing while
Black" carries with it a sense of sobering precarity? What is the
significance of creating Black literature within a publishing industry that is
itself an engine of racial inequality in terms of demographics and the
literature itself? We will read broadly to find answers to these questions, and
may encounter fiction, essays, poetry, plays, and the graphic novel along the
way. Major authors may include but not be limited to: Brit Bennett, Sarah
Broom, Tyehimba Jess, Mat Johnson, John Keene, Robin Coste Lewis, Kiese Laymon,
Brandon Taylor, Danez Smith, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead. Issues of race,
gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic difference are discussed at length in this
course. This course is open both to intended Literature majors and to others
interested in developing skills in close-reading and critical analysis.
Course: |
LIT 139 Monsters я Us |
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Professor: |
Cole Heinowitz |
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CRN: |
90259 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 2:00 PM - 3:20
PM Olin Languages Center 208 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of the
word "monster" (ca. 1375) is: "a mythical creature which is part
animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is
frequently of great size and ferocious appearance." By the early sixteenth
century, "monster" had also come to refer to "a person of
repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such extreme cruelty or
wickedness as to appear inhuman." These definitions remind us that
monstrosity is not the opposite of humanity; on the contrary, what makes
monsters monstrous is precisely their resemblance to humans. If monsters are
not humanity's "other" but rather its uncanny double, what stories do
they enable us to tell about ourselves? Why does Frankenstein give life to an
eight-foot tall creature fashioned from human and nonhuman body parts rather
than, say, a human child? Why has the historical Vlad the Impaler been largely
forgotten while his undead avatar, Dracula, remains a staple of gothic
literature and popular culture? Reading monster narratives from the late
eighteenth to the late twentieth century (including works by Charles Brockden
Brown, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Metcalf, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ursula Le Guin), this course
will explore the influence of race, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, and
sexuality on the construction of the "human" as a privileged
category.
Course: |
LIT 139 B Monsters я
Us |
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Professor: |
Cole Heinowitz |
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CRN: |
90856 |
Schedule: |
Mon 12:10 PM -
1:30 PM Olin 202 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
2 |
(2
Credits) See above for description. This is a 2-credit version of LIT 129 meeting once
a week.
Course: |
LIT 144 Making Love: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry |
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Professor: |
Adhaar Desai |
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CRN: |
90260 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin
Languages Center 118 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities
When we think about Renaissance poetry, we tend to think of the sonnet: rule-bound,
blatantly artificial, and old-fashioned. The funny thing is, the poets writing
in the Renaissance tried everything they could to make their poems appear as
just the opposite: organic, sincere, and excitingly new. Just beneath the
veneer of formal qualities like rhyme and meter, poems from the period are
sensitive and probing explorations of chaos, frustration, madness, desire, and
the sublime. This course focuses on the theme of love as a psychological,
emotional, and political concept to examine how poets in the period fought with
language in order to make poetry say things that could not be said otherwise.
Our units will consider how both the concept of love and the poetic techniques
used to articulate it intersect in surprising ways with political subversion,
queerness, and religious doubt. Through both critical assignments and creative
exercises, including engaging with digital media to better understand how the
technologies of publication shape the transmission of ideas, we'll hone a deep
understanding of essential aspects of poetry while we think about how it was
(and still is) a tool for thought and an instrument of emotional understanding.
The course covers a broad range of significant (and significantly undervalued, self-consciously strange, or
flagrantly subversive) works of poetry, and will pay particular attention to
poetry by women. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne will take their place in
context alongside Thomas Wyatt, Philip and Mary Sidney, Ben Jonson, Katherine
Philips, Mary Wroth, and George Herbert. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature
course offering.
Course: |
LIT 148
Labor and Migration in Arabic Literature |
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Professor: |
Dina
Ramadan |
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CRN: |
90742 |
Schedule: |
Mon
Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Aspinwall
302 |
Distributional
Area: |
FL Foreign
Languages and Lit |
Class cap |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Human
Rights; Middle Eastern Studies
Questions of migration,
exile, and displacement have been central to the development of the (post)colonial
Arabic literary tradition. Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North,
widely considered the most important Arabic novel of the last century, charts
Mustafa Said’s journey taking him further and further from Sudan, and the
frustrations and impossibility of homecoming. While the effects of the
expulsions of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) and the further
displacement of the 1967 Naksa (setback)
on the evolution of Arabic prose and poetry are widely recognized, questions
surrounding labor, its precarities, and
migrations are largely understudied. How for example, does the intersection of
a booming oil economy with a displaced and transient workforce, reshape the
cultural map of the region and beyond? Rather than treat the questions of labor
and (forced) migration as separate, in this course we will look at them as
intertwined and interdependent. By focusing on Arabic literary production from
the second half of the 20th century, we will ask how such works
produce a language and aesthetic of displacement and estrangement, one that is
able to challenge the hegemony of national boundaries. Finally, we will
consider how these literary texts, as well as their authors, travel and migrate
to speak to different audiences and from new and shifting centers. Literary
texts will be supplemented by theoretical and historical material and will be
accompanied by regular film screenings. All readings will be in
English. This course is part of the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced
Migration, Displacement and Education initiative. This
course is part of the World Literature course offering.
Pre-Moderation Required Course: Narrative / Poetics Representation
Course: |
LIT 201 A Narrative/Poetics/Representation |
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Professor: |
Adhaar Desai |
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CRN: |
90251 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Olin 107 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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.
Course: |
LIT 201 B Narrative/Poetics/Representation |
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Professor: |
Alys Moody |
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CRN: |
90252 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin
310 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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.
Course: |
LIT 204A Comparative Literature I: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance |
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Professor: |
Karen Sullivan |
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CRN: |
90253 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin
203 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: 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.
Course: |
LIT 204B Comparative Literature II: Dreamers and Disruptors:
The Birth of Modern European Literature |
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Professor: |
Joseph Luzzi |
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CRN: |
90254 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Olin 309 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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.
Course: |
LIT 252 English Literature III: Empire, Equality, Ecology |
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Professor: |
Daniel Williams |
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CRN: |
90255 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 3:50 PM - 5:10
PM Olin 203 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) A
broad survey of British literature and culture from the early 19th through the
late 20th century, with readings organized according to three interconnected
themes. First, the expansion, critique, and eventual dissolution of the British
Empire, with its concomitant effects on colonized (and later postcolonial)
peoples around the globe. Next, Britain's rapid industrialization and the
resultant shifts in humanity's relationship to the natural world, partly
reflected in scientific and ecological writing. Finally, the widening of
equality, particularly in terms of class and gender, with its attendant social
and political upheavals. We will consider how literature interacted with these
developments, looking at various literary movements and a range of evolutions
in form, genre, and style. Readings will include poetry, short stories, novels,
plays, manifestos, and essays, as well as relevant historical and theoretical
materials.
Course: |
LIT 257 American Literature I: The Open Boat |
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Professor: |
Alex Benson |
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CRN: |
90256 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin
205 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies
American literature from the colonial period to the early republic (16th
to early 19th century) is a field of myriad, unstable genres. So in this course
our readings will set gothic novels alongside political tracts, captivity
narratives alongside hymns, and lyric poems alongside works of natural history.
We will read texts from the period by Charles Brockden Brown, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Jonathan Edwards, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah Foster, Cotton
Mather, Samson Occom, Mary Rowlandson, and Phillis Wheatley. And to consider
their contemporary echoes, we will bring them into dialogue with later writers
including Gloria Anzaldúa, Edouard Glissant, Leila Lalami, and Sylvia Wynter.
Through these texts, we will address questions of difference and justice -- of
labor extraction, religious conflict, gender inequality, and the processes of
settler colonialism -- as they shape (and are imaginatively reconfigured by)
the literary traditions and innovations that come into view during the period.
Course: |
LIT 258 American Literature II: The Struggle for a
Democratic Poetics |
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Professor: |
Matthew Mutter |
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CRN: |
90257 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 3:50 PM - 5:10
PM Olin 204 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban
Studies
(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.)
This course explores the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century and
seeks to sharpen student practice in close reading and historical
contextualization. Discussion includes a
variety of topics, among them the engrafting of American Puritanism with
American Romanticism; wilderness, westward expansion and emergent empire;
metaphor and figurations of selfhood, knowledge, divinity and nature; the
slavery crisis, Civil War and democratic poetics. Writers include Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass,
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson.
200-Level Literature Courses
Course: |
LIT 2053 Once Upon A Time: The Folktales of the Brothers
Grimm |
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Professor: |
Franz Kempf |
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CRN: |
90261 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Olin
203 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: German
Studies
"Enchanting, brimming with wonder and magic, the fairy tales of the
Brothers Grimm are the special stories of childhood that stay with us throughout
our lives," writes translator and Grimm scholar Jack Zipes. Unfortunately,
we seem to know these tales only in adaptations that greatly reduce their power
to touch our emotions and engage our imaginations. Through a close reading of
selected tales, with emphasis on language, plot, motif, and image, this course
explores not only the tales' poetics and politics but also their origins in the
oral tradition, in folklore and myth. The course considers major critical
approaches (e.g., Freudian, Marxist, feminist) and conducts a contrastive
analysis of creative adaptations (Disney, classical ballet, postmodern dance)
and other fairy-tale traditions (Perrault, Straparola, Arabian Nights).
Creative and critical writing assignments. Taught in English. Tutorial in
German can be arranged.
Course: |
LIT 2054 Sympathy for the Devil |
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Professor: |
Francine Prose |
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CRN: |
90262 |
Schedule: |
Fri 2:00 PM - 4:20
PM Olin 202 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Human Rights
How do writers create sympathy for their characters, not only the angelic
but the demonic? Are there characters who are beyond our sympathy? Can literature
affect our capacity for compassion? We will consider these questions as we read a range of writers including
Dante, Beckett, Milton, James Alan McPherson, Chekhov, Kleist, ZZ Packer, Roberto Bolaà±o, Amos Tutuola,
Jane Bowles, Molly Keane, Mavis Gallant, Denis Johnson, Kevin Barry and others.
We will also watch one or more seasons of the HBO series, The Wire. Students,
who will write a brief weekly paper, and who will occasionally be asked to read
a novel in a week, should write to me at prose@bard.edu, explaining their
reasons for wanting to take the course.
Course: |
LIT 2055 Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets:
Modern Japanese Avant-Gardes |
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Professor: |
Nathan Shockey |
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CRN: |
90263 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin
Languages Center 115 |
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities
In this class, we will trace a prismatic cascade of experimental movements
in Japanese literary, visual, plastic, and performance arts and architecture,
from the turn of the 20th century through the present. The organizing concept
of the course is the critic Hanada Kiyoteru's idea of sà´gà´ geijitsu =
"art as synthesis" - as a means to understand the mutually productive
movements of textual, visual, haptic, and auditory media within their global
and transnational contexts. We will begin with prewar Japanese re-imaginations
of Euro-American historical avant-gardes and political vanguards, then follow a
fragmented trajectory that includes movements such as Fluxus, Neo-Dadaism, and
New Wave Cinema, the political provocations of Hi-Red Center, the Sogetsu Art Center
scene, divergent trends in photographic experimentation, the Underground
Theater of the 1970s, architectural Metabolism, haute couture fashion, noise
music, new millennium pop art, contemporary political protest, and much more.
Throughout, we will consider the complex dialectics at play between aesthetic
and political avant-gardes at play on the razor's edge of reification in the
commercial sphere. This course is part
of the World Literature course offering.
Course: |
LIT 2057 Youth in Precarious Japan |
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Professor: |
Wakako Suzuki |
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CRN: |
90264 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 3:50 PM – 5:100
PM Olin Language Center 208 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap |
20 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies
This course explores the theme of youth and adolescence in literary and
cinematic works from late 19th-century to contemporary Japan. It examines how the
development of industrial capitalism, Japanese colonialism, World War II, the
US occupation, the regional Cold War order, the Japanese economic miracle, and
the recent recession have been presented differently when we employ the
perspective of youth. The course introduces the following key topics:
sexuality, romance, friendship, same-sex love, education, family, ethnic
identity, disability and anxiety. Particular issues that young people wrestle
with have varied in each period. However, youth and adolescents have
continuously grappled with the idea of "social identities" that
navigate them into mature adulthood or socially expected gender norms, such as
masculinity and femininity. Young people's hopes, dreams, disillusionment,
frustrations, and struggles will be examined through selected literary and
cinematic works. We also consider the intersection of race, class, gender, and
sexual identity in Japanese society but also across countries from the
perspective of Difference and Justice. The historical approach to literary and
cinematic works provides comparative context to bridge our understanding of
representation and the social context negotiated by creators and recipients.
Readings include works by Natsume Soseki, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kunikida Doppo, Izumi
Kyoka, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo,
Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki. Cinematic works include works by Ozu
Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, and Koreeda Hirokazu. We also expand
our horizons to music, visual images, and magazines. This course is part of the World Literature
course offering.
Course: |
LIT 2213 Building Stories |
||
Professor: |
Peter L'Official |
||
CRN: |
90270 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Hegeman
102 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Architecture; Environmental
& Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities
Cities and their surrounds have long been fertile grounds for the
construction of narrative. This course examines relationships between
narratives and their settings by employing conceptual frameworks borrowed from
architectural studies and histories of the built environment. Weekly
discussions of a wide range of texts—literary and otherwise—will be structured
around building typologies and common tropes of urban planning: the row-house
brownstone, the apartment building, the skyscraper, the suburban or rural
house, and the arteries of linkage between them. We will read each set of texts
as narratives of place, space, and architecture to discover what, if any,
architectures of narrative may undergird or influence them. We will consider to
what extent geography and landscape shape culture and identity; we'll chart
relationships between race, class, gender, and the environment as articulated
by the city and related regions; and we will explore notions of public and
private space and our ever-mutable understandings of what it means to be
"urban." Texts will include novels, essays, films, visual art, and
graphic novels. Authors may include: Alison Bechdel, Sarah Broom, June Jordan,
Rem Koolhaas, Ben Lerner, Kevin Lynch, Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, D.J.
Waldie, Colson Whitehead.
Course: |
LIT 2311 St. Petersburg: City, Monument, Text |
||
Professor: |
Olga Voronina |
||
CRN: |
90271 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Albee 106 |
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Russian
Studies
Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers built St. Petersburg, but it was
the writers who put it on the cultural map of the world. Founded on the
outskirts of the empire, the city served as a missing link between
"enlightened" Europe and "barbaric" Asia, between the
turbulent past of the Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered
to be too cold, too formal, too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg
harbored revolutionary ideas and terrorist movements that threatened to explode
from within. While its granite quays were erected to withstand the assault of
the floods, some of its most famous monuments, including literary works,
resisted the onset of new, radical ideologies.
In this course, we will study the conflicting nature of the city as
reflected in literature and literary criticism. The poems and novels on our
reading list will provide a sweeping overview of Russia's literary canon in the
19th and 20th centuries, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and from Gogol to Bely and
Nabokov. After exploring Queen of Spades, Crime and Punishment, and Anna
Karenina, we will move on to Petersburg and The Defense, thus undertaking a
journey through Russia's literary tradition and the urban landscape of the
north with the authors who either reconstructed St. Petersburg in their memory
or re-visited it in their imaginations.
Course: |
LIT 2318 Toward the Condition of Music: Poetry and Aesthetics
in Victorian England |
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Professor: |
Stephen Graham |
||
CRN: |
90265 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Reem
Kayden Center 111 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
John Ruskin announced in Modern Painters (1843) that the greatest art must
contain "the greatest number of the greatest ideas." Fifty years
later, Oscar Wilde declared with equal assurance the "All art is quite
useless." What happened in that intervening half-century? Reading major
Victorian poets including Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy, as well as criticism by John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold,
Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde—among the finest prose stylists of the
century—this course follows the evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the
accompanying Victorian debate about the status of art and of the artist in
relation to society. This latter narrative begins with Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Poet Laureate and cultural institution, and concludes with Oscar Wilde, social
pariah and convicted felon, as Victorian poets gradually withdraw from their
position in the center of the culture to a stance of defiance, transgression,
and martyrdom.
Course: |
LIT 2319 The Art of Translation |
||
Professor: |
Peter Filkins |
||
CRN: |
90272 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin
303 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Written Arts
By comparing multiple translations of literary, religious, and
philosophical texts, this course will examine the way in which translation
shapes textual meaning and our appreciation of it. We will also read several
key theoretical essays that trace differing approaches to translation and what
can or cannot be expected from translation. Finally, students will also take on
a short translation project of their own in order to explore firsthand what it
means to translate. Brief comparative readings will include multiple
translations of Homer, Sappho, Plato, the Bible, Nietzsche, Tolstoy,
Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Babel, Rilke, Neruda, Borges, Basho, Li Po, and
Celan. Essays on translation will include those by Dryden, Schleiermacher,
Humboldt, Goethe, Benjamin, Valéry, Paz, and Nossack. Students should contact
instructor to get permission.
Course: |
LIT 240 Literary Journalism |
||
Professor: |
Ian Buruma |
||
CRN: |
90266 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 10:20 AM - 11:40
AM Olin 204 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Human Rights
This course will offer an introduction to the best of literary journalism
since Hazlitt. We will read texts such as Hazlitt's own The Fight(1822) and
Emile Zola's J'Accuse (1898). From there we will move on to readings that will
encompass criticism (of art, theater, film, music), political reportage, travel
essays, and war reporting. Writers will include H.L. Mencken, Gay Talese, V. S.
Naipaul, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, and Zadie Smith. What makes some
journalism literary, and not just informative, is to some extent a question of
taste and subjective judgment. But the main thing is that the text has lasting
value on merits unrelated to topicality. The aim of this course is to teach
students how to read a literary text, and appreciate its value. But just as
important is to impart a sense of history. The essays will give students a chance
to consider past events in some depth. This should help them develop their
writing, as well as analytical skills, and give them some historical grounding
as well.
Course: |
LIT 245 Palestinian Literature in Translation |
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Professor: |
Elizabeth Holt |
||
CRN: |
90552 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 2:00 PM - 3:20
PM Olin Languages Center 118 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies
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.
Course: |
LIT 2485 James Joyce's Fiction |
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Professor: |
Elizabeth Frank |
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CRN: |
90273 |
Schedule: |
Wed Thurs 8:30 AM
– 9:50 AM Olin 107 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies
Joyce was an autobiographical writer who wrote about one place, Dublin.
And he was an experimental writer and a prominent Modernist in tune with the
literary and artistic innovations of the early twentieth century. We will read
his short stories in Dubliners and his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the
Artist As a Young Man as well as his modern epic Ulysses.
Course: |
LIT 280 The Heroic Age |
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Professor: |
Karen Sullivan |
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CRN: |
90268 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin
205 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Medieval Studies
In this course, we will be reading the great
epics and sagas of the early Middle Ages, concentrating upon northern Europe. Through
these texts, we will explore the tensions between paganism and Christianity,
individual glory and kingly authority, and heroism and monstrosity. Texts to be
read include the Old English Beowulf; the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge; the Old
Norse Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil's Saga; the Old French Song of
Roland; and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied; the Old Norse Poetic and Prose Eddas, Saga
of the Volsungs, and Egil's
Saga; the Old French Song of Roland; the Middle High German Nibelungenlied;
and the Finnish Kalevala. Consideration will be given to the resonance of these
works in modern literature and culture. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.
Cross-listed courses:
Course: |
ASIA 205 Representations of Tibet |
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Professor: |
Li-Hua Ying |
||
CRN: |
90200 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 2:00 PM - 3:20
PM Olin Languages Center 210 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap |
19 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Chinese; Human Rights; Literature
Course: |
CLAS 245 The Iliad of Homer |
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Professor: |
Daniel Mendelsohn |
||
CRN: |
90205 |
Schedule: |
Tue 2:00 PM - 4:20
PM Olin 305 |
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
Class cap |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Literature
Course: |
HR 267 Human Rights and Decolonization |
||
Professor: |
Alys Moody |
||
CRN: |
90142 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Reem
Kayden Center 101 |
Distributional Area: |
MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice |
Class cap |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Global & International Studies; Literature
Course: |
MES 2030 Freedom is a Constant Struggle: The History
of Black-Palestinian Solidarity |
||
Professor: |
Dina Ramadan |
||
CRN: |
90743 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin
101 |
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit D+J Difference and
Justice |
Class cap |
19 |
Credits: |
2 |
Cross-listed: Africana
Studies; Human Rights; Literature
This two-credit course
will meet for the first seven weeks of the semester.
Course: |
SPAN 241 20th Century Spanish American Short Story |
||
Professor: |
John Burns |
||
CRN: |
90267 |
Schedule: |
Tue Thurs
2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Aspinwall
302 |
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
Class cap |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: Latin American/Iberian Studies; Literature
Course: |
WRIT 216 Contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic
Poetics |
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Professor: |
Jenny Xie |
||
CRN: |
90387 |
Schedule: |
Mon Wed 2:00 PM - 3:20
PM Olin 308 |
Distributional Area: |
PA Practicing Arts |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Asian Studies; Literature