LIT 201 replaces the former LIT 103 moderation requirement for Literature and Written Arts. Students who have already taken LIT 103 should not enroll in this course.

12498

LIT 201 A

Narrative /Poetics/Representation

Adhaar Desai

T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 308

ELIT

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.

Class size: 18

12490

LIT 201 B

Narrative /Poetics/Representation

Daniel Williams

M W 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 305

ELIT

Class size: 18

LITERATURE SEQUENCE COURSES: Historical studies in the Comparative, English, and American literature traditions are organized into sequences. Please notify the instructor if you need a sequence course in order to moderate in spring 2020.

12063

LIT 204C

Comparative Literature III: The City, the Novel, and the Making of Modern Identity

Marina van Zuylen

T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course centers on key texts from French, German, Russian, and British literature, from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We will consider novelists who have diagnosed the effects of urban reality on their protagonists, prompting their readers to link the transformation of traditional power structures, the rise of social mobility, and the increasing centrality of science, to new literary techniques and a breakdown in self presentation. Belief and doubt, the real and the fantastic, omniscience and fragmentation, are at play in most of our texts. Readings will be from Balzac, Baudelaire, Brecht, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Hoffman, Woolf, and Zola.

Class size: 22

12064

LIT 251

English Literature II: Science, Empire, and the Rise of Popular Culture

Adhaar Desai

M W 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLINLC 208

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, an era of vital transition between a period of dissent and civil war to a period that announced itself as “enlightened.” While the end of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of modern ideals like scientific inquiry, human rights, and political compromise, this emergence happened against the background of an increasingly rigid class system, colonialism, and the global slave trade. Tracing these historical developments through literary texts preoccupied with thwarted ideals, the course begins with writings that exposed social practices as broken or oppressive, such as John Webster’s violent tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, poetry by women like Katherine Philips and Aemelia Lanyer, and Francis Bacon’s treatises reforming scientific practice. It then arrives at the story of Satan’s rebellion against God in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a text written in the wake of the English Civil War and consequently steeped in a profound sense of contradiction and conflict. Turning from this epic poem to the rise of narrative fiction, the course will examine Margaret Cavendish’s work of utopian science fiction, The Blazing World; Aphra Behn’s romanticized slave narrative, Oroonoko; Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel, Gulliver’s Travels; and Eliza Haywood’s troubling love story Fantomina. With these readings, we will examine how literature helped constitute what we know today as “popular culture,” and consider how fiction and popular media remain central to ongoing questions relating to identity, political representation, and social critique.

Class size: 22

12065

LIT 252

English Literature III: Explosions in the Anthropocene

Cole Heinowitz

M W 3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course explores developments in British literature, culture, and ideas from the late 18th through the early 21st century. Our study begins with the radical material and ideological transformations of the Romantic Period—the rise of industrial capitalism, urbanization, the expansion of empire, advances in the experimental sciences, the growth of a mass reading public, battles over slavery and women’s rights, the search for national and ethnic origins, class revolution in France, and a flood of anti-colonial revolts across the Americas. Moving through the Victorian Era, the fin-de-siècle, Modernism, two World Wars, the post-war period, decolonization, and the Cold War, we end roughly in the present-day of late capitalism, globalization, Thatcherism, Brexit, and environmental crisis. Throughout the course, there will be a strong emphasis on the dynamic relationship between material history, cultural paradigms, and literary form. Readings will include works by both canonical and lesser-known writers including Mary Wollstonecraft, S.T. Coleridge, the Shelleys, John Clare, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Sarah Kane, and Timothy Morton.

Class size: 22

12066

LIT 258

American Literature II: The Struggle for a Democratic Poetics

Matthew Mutter

T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 201

D+J

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course provides an introduction to American literature written from roughly 1830 to the turn of the twentieth century. Course objectives include honing attentiveness to the subtleties of literary form, understanding the cultural, political, and intellectual contexts of nineteenth-century American writing, and developing skills in critical writing. Our intellectual and aesthetic concerns will include: the ambiguous legacy of Puritanism; the witnesses and critics of the institution of slavery; the American mode of Romanticism; the aspiration to extricate American literature from European traditions and to forge a distinctly democratic poetics; the figurations and politics of “wilderness” and the “frontier”; and the impact of Darwinism on the development of “naturalist” literary genres. Authors will likely include Hawthorne, Douglass, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson, Stowe, Whitman, Jacobs, Poe, and Crane.

Class size: 22

12067

LIT 259

American Literature III: What Does it Mean to be Modern?

Peter L'Official

T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 202

D+J

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) In focusing upon this era's major authors and works, we will closely attend to the formal characteristics of this period's literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism) while examining many of the principal historical contexts for understanding the development of American literature and culture (including debates about immigration, urbanization, industrialization, inequality, racial discrimination, and the rise of new technologies of communication and mass entertainment). Writers likely to be encountered include: James, Cather, Wharton, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Toomer, Hurston, and Faulkner.

Class size: 22