Pre-Moderation Required Course: Narrative / Poetics Representation

 

Course:

LIT 201 A Narrative/Poetics/Representation

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

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

Professor:

Alys Moody  

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

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

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

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

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

Professor:

Daniel Williams  

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

Professor:

Alex Benson  

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

Professor:

Matthew Mutter  

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.