12026

LIT 3019      Nabokov:Conclusive Writing

Olga Voronina

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 309

LA

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course will focus on Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories as well as his memoir Conclusive Evidence and the novel Pnin, both of which first appeared in story-length installments in The New Yorker.  We will read “Details of a Sunset,” “Christmas,” “A Guide to Berlin,” “A Nursery Tale,” “The Visit to the Museum,” “The Circle,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” “Ultima Thule,” “Solus Rex,” “Signs and Symbols,” and “The Vane Sisters.” Keeping our eyes open for the elusive, but meaningful, textual details and discussing the writer’s narrative strategies, we will also trace the metaphysical streak that runs through the entire Nabokov oeuvre. A discussion of all matters editorial will be our priority. We will study Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine White and William Maxwell, his editors at The New Yorker, and look at the drafts of his stories, now part of the Berg Collection in the NYPL. Our endeavor to understand the Nabokovian process of composition and revision will go hand-in-hand with the work on our own writing.  This course is a literature junior seminar.  

Class size: 15

 

12075

LIT 3048      Extraordinary Bodies: Disability in American Literature and Culture

Jaime Alves

Th    10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 107

LA D+J

ELIT DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights

In this course, we will examine U.S. fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama to understand how writers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries represent the “normal” body, as well as a constellation of bodies presented as extraordinary: bodies disfigured at birth or by illness or war; bodies paraded as “freaks”; bodies that don’t fit into established categories. We begin in the early nineteenth century, when popular Enlightenment ideology suggested Americans could control their own destinies, making and remaking their characters, and even their bodies, at will. What ideas emerged here about the kind of self one should make, and the kinds of bodies that should be discarded? How were those ideas proffered in and shaped by literary imaginings? How have they persisted and changed over time, especially in relation to ideas about American identity? Our reading list takes us into the present day, and includes an introduction to the major questions and scholarly perspectives under debate in the emerging field of Disability Studies. Possible readings include short fiction by Poe, Hawthorne, Steinbeck, O’Connor, and Morrison; novels by Howe The Hermaphrodite, Phelps The Silent Partner, Davis Life in the Iron Mills, and Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; memoirs by Keller, Mairs, Fries, and Kuusisto; drama by Nussbaum (Mishuganismo); and poetry by Whitman and Barnes, and from the groundbreaking recent anthology, Beauty is a Verb.

Class size: 15

 

12029

LIT 3205      Love & Death in Dante

Joseph Luzzi

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 101

FL

FLLC

 Cross-listed: 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 course counts as pre-1800 offering. 

Class size: 15

 

12030

LIT 331      Translation Workshop

Peter Filkins

Th     1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 306

FL

FLLC

Cross-listed: Written Arts

 The workshop is intended for students interested in exploring both the process of translation and ways in which meaning is created and shaped through words. Class time will be divided between a consideration of various approaches to the translation of poetry and prose, comparisons of various solutions arrived at by different translators, and the students' own translations into English of poetry and prose from any language or text of their own choosing. Prerequisite: One year of language study or permission of the instructor.

Class size: 12

 

12072

LIT 333      Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M          1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 101

LA

ELIT

In this course students will have the unique opportunity to meet and interact with several leading contemporary writers who will join us in class to discuss their work, answer your questions about their personal approaches to the art of fiction, and then give a public reading from new work in progress or a recently published book. Authors who will be visiting class include Joyce Carol Oates, Carole Maso, and Brandon Hobson whose novel Where the Dead Sit Talking was a 2018 National Book Award finalist. We will also devote much time to close readings of key novels and short story collections by innovative fiction writers of the past couple of generations, with an eye toward exploring the diverse visions and styles employed in these narratives as well as the cultural, political, and societal issues they chronicle. Particular emphasis will be placed on reading and analyzing books by some of fiction’s most pioneering practitioners, including William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic, Angela Carter’s Burning Your Boats, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Zadie Smith’s Grand Union, along with others that have revitalized and revolutionized our understanding of narrative forms.

Class size: 12

 

12482

LIT 338      Literature, Politics, and the Middle East

Ziad Dallal

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 305

LA

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

 How can we read literature politically and how does literature affect, relate to, and change our understanding of politics? This course will investigate these questions by reading how Arabic literature has engaged with and pushed the limits of political discourse from the 19th century to the present. Our aim will be to read literature not as a repository or index of political discourse, but as formative of this discourse. We will be reading both Arabic novels and plays by authors such as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, May Ziade, and Sulayman al-Bassam, among others. We will read how the literary output of these novelists pushed the envelope of political discourse by virtue of their literary experimentation. Supplementing these readings will be selections from the work of Samah Selim, Jacques Rancière, Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, among others. Conducted in English. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 15

 

12073

LIT 344      Calderwood Seminar: Literature Live! Writing about Contemporary American Literature

Joseph Luzzi

W        10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 101

LA

ELIT

 Who are the writers that are changing the culture in the U.S. today? Students in this Calderwood Seminar will develop the tools to write about contemporary American literature in the style of the “public intellectual,” the critic or commentator who can communicate complex ideas with style and clarity, and as part of a broader cultural conversation. Assignments will include book reviews in the style of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, a profile of an author, and studies of contemporary American readership and literary culture. Students will maintain a weekly blog that will serve as both a record of their engagement with the course material and an archive for their work. Authors we will discuss are likely to include Ben Lerner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Jamison, Gary Shteyngart, and many others. Weekly meetings will include discussion of the particular book or work under review; workshops of student work; and analysis of individual authors as well as consideration of the broad cultural trends related to the reception of their work. The Calderwood Seminars are writing-intensive classes designed to help students think about how to translate their discipline (in this case, literature) to non-specialists through different forms of public writing. Students will be expected to write or edit one short piece of writing per week.

Class size: 12

 

12496

LIT 348      Black Skin, White Masks: Decolonization through Fanon

Alys Moody

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

RKC 200

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; French Studies; Human Rights

Contemporary political activism often calls on us to “decolonize” our lives, our curricula, and our minds. Where does the concept of decolonization come from? What can we learn by reading the history of decolonial thought as a simultaneously literary, political, and philosophical project? This course approaches these questions through a sustained reading of the work of Frantz Fanon, a Martinican writer, intellectual, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary, who became one of the leading thinkers of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read Fanon’s key texts—including Black Skin, White Masks, his analysis of the psychopathologies produced by colonial racism, and The Wretched of the Earth, his controversial defense of anticolonial violence—in their larger literary, philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic contexts. Our goal is to see how Fanon’s distinctively literary writing allows him to make important advances in thought, and to see how he draws on literary and other sources to develop his account of racism and colonization—as well as to see a way beyond them. Placing Fanon into dialogue with poets and novelists like Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, and Léopold Senghor, philosophers like Hegel and Sartre, psychologists such as Freud and Alfred Adler, and the political discourse and debates of his day, we will ask: how does colonization produce the colonized and the colonizers? What are the psychological and social results of this process? And what would true decolonization require? This course is a junior seminar and will train students in the reading of theory in its historical, literary, and philosophical contexts. Students will work towards a sustained research essay as part of the course. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar and part of the World Literature offering course.

Class size: 15

 

12499

LIT 356      Playing in the Dark: Toni Morrison’s Literary Imagination

Peter L'Official

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 200

LA

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies

“How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be “universal” or race free?” This course takes Toni Morrison’s book-length 1992 essay, Playing in the Dark, (the above quotes are drawn from its Preface) as inspiration for an exploration of not only Morrison’s own fiction, non-fiction, and work as a literary editor, but also how to read—and read critically--within the fields of American and African American literature. We will read Morrison’s work (and that of her contemporaries, predecessors, critics, and scholars) in order to examine issues of race and ethnicity, gender, language, identity, and technique, and we will attempt to ask and answer versions of these very same opening questions that Morrison herself leveled at American fiction. This is a Literature Junior Seminar, and as such we will devote substantial time to methods of research, writing, and revision. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar and fulfills the American Studies Junior Seminar requirement.

Class size: 15

 

12074

LIT 393      Ten Plays that Shook the World

Justus Rosenberg

T        10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 107

LA

ELIT

 A close reading and textual analysis of plays considered milestones in the history of the theater.  In this course we isolate and examine the artistic, social and psychological components that made these works become part of the literary canon.   Have they lasted because they conjure up fantasies of escape, or make its readers and viewers face dilemmas inherent in certain social conditions or archetypical conflicts?   What was it exactly that made them so shocking when first performed?  The language, theme, style, staging?  We also explore the theatre as a literary genre that goes beyond the writing.  For a meaningful and effective performance, all aspects of the play, directing, acting, staging, lighting will be considered.  This course is part of the World Literature offering. 

Class size: 15

 

12077

LIT 405      Senior Colloquium: Literature

Marisa Libbon

M          4:40 pm-6:00 pm

OLIN 204

LA

 1 credit   Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers. 

Class size: 22

 

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

12469

CLAS 237      The Classical Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn

T          1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 301

LA

Cross-listed: Literature Class size: 22

 

12473

FREN 342      Theorizing the French Novel

Marina van Zuylen

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 305

FL D+J

Cross-listed: Literature; Philosophy; Sociology Class size: 15

 

12031

SPAN 301      Intro to Spanish Literature

Patricia Lopez-Gay

T  Th  1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLINLC 120

FL

FLLC

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Latin American & Iberian Studies; Literature Class size: 15

 

12474

SPAN 359      Haunted by Ghost of Cervantes

Patricia Lopez-Gay

W      10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 307

FL

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Latin American & Iberian Studies; Literature