Course:

LIT/MES 303  Petroculture

Professor:

Elizabeth Holt  

CRN:

15725

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Literature, Science, Technology, Society

This course joins a growing movement to imagine a world after oil, focusing on North America's relationship with the Middle East. We will read from the Petrocultures group and a broad range of work produced in English and Arabic -- from Allen Ginsberg and William Faulkner, to Shell Oil, to the Iraq Petroleum Company, to Amitav Ghosh, to Ghassan Kanafani and Abdelrahman Munif -- in order to historicize and theorize the literary formations, aesthetics and metaphors produced by and productive of petroleum. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 3043  Melville

Professor:

Alex Benson  

CRN:

15731

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: American Studies

This course follows the mutations of a career, Herman Melville's, that produced both hugely popular adventure novels and commercially disastrous narrative experiments. The latter category includes Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, to which we will devote extended time mid-semester. But we will also read widely in the author’s lesser-known works, from early short fiction to late poetry. Topics of special interest will include the representation of race, law, sexuality, and ecology. To explore those topics, we will put Melville’s work in conversation with artists and writers including John Akomfrah, Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth Bishop, and C. L. R. James—all while keeping our eyes on Melville's distinctive and often radical sense of ethics and aesthetics.

 

Course:

LIT 3205  Love and Death in Dante

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

CRN:

15732

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: 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 Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 322  Representing the Unspeakable

Professor:

Marina van Zuylen  

CRN:

15727

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Human Rights

What means do writers use to demonstrate conditions that defy our comprehension? This seminar will focus on how literary works from diverse genres find a language to describe emotions and experiences that usually cannot be translated into everyday speech.  We will examine how figurative tropes such as description and metaphor, allegory and indirect discourse, can evoke powerful states of physical difference, psychological and social negativity: depression, failure, discrimination, loneliness.  How do these tropes help illuminate the distinction between the human and the non-human, between success and failure? Readings will include: Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein," Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis," Mark Haddon’s "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," Jenny Erpenbeck’s "Go, Went, Gone," Coetzee’s "The Lives of the Animals," and Hervé Guibert’s "Blindsight." Theoretical texts will include: Foucault, Scarry, Manning, Rancière. Prerequisite: Students need to have read Shelley's Frankenstein before the first class. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar.

 

Course:

LIT 3251  Climate Fiction

Professor:

Daniel Williams  

CRN:

15733

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? How has our urgent ecological crisis shaped the scales, genres, and plots of contemporary fiction? This course surveys the literary genre that has lately come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, we will consider realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. Regions may include the United States, Europe, West Africa, and India; authors may include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, Amitav Ghosh, and Ian McEwan. We will examine how literature engages (or not) central concepts in earth-system science and scenarios of ecological calamity (hurricanes, megafires, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss); how it critiques (or not) environmental racism and injustice; and how it envisions possible futures for humanity in the Anthropocene. Reading critical materials from across the environmental humanities, we will also think about the challenges of narrative, representation, sympathy, and imagination as they apply to literature and climate policy. The course will emphasize methods of research, writing, and revision essential for Senior Projects in literature and other humanities fields. This course fulfills the Literature Junior seminar. This course is a Junior Seminar course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 331  Translation Workshop

Professor:

Peter Filkins  

CRN:

15728

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

 

Crosslists: 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.

 

Course:

LIT 334  Fantastika and the New Gothic

Professor:

Bradford Morrow  

CRN:

15729

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Thanks to the liberating work of innovative writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Rikki Ducornet, and Akil Kumarasamy (all of

whom will be visiting class in person to discuss their writing with us), the critical boundaries between literary and genre fiction

have become increasingly ambiguous. Traditional gothic authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory

Lewis, Mary Shelley, Sara Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters, Bram Stoker, and others framed their tales within the

metaphoric landscapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by protagonists whose troubled

psyches led them far beyond the verges of propriety and sanity. While embracing these fundamentally dark artistic visions, later

masters radically reinvented and contemporized tropes, settings, and narrative strategies to create a new era in this tradition.

Identified as the “New Gothic,” this phase appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon, termed by

speculative fiction theorist John Clute as “Fantastika,” whose achievement is to have taken the genres of fantastic, fabular, and

horror fiction in a similar groundbreaking directions. While reenvisioning the spirit that animates its genre forebears, writers

like Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, N. K. Jemisin, Joyce Carol Oates, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Sofia Samatar,

Julia Elliott, George Saunders, and Elizabeth Hand have created a body of important literary fiction that we will focus on in this

course.

 

Course:

LIT 3356  Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory

Professor:

Franco Baldasso  

CRN:

15724

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Human Rights; Italian Studies

Is it possible to think of modernity without taking into account fascism? Why were so many modernists, from Ezra Pound to F.T. Marinetti and Gertrude Stein fascinated by fascist dystopia and actively contributed to its propaganda? This course approaches the rise of fascism in Italy as an expression of political and social palingenesis, and focuses on the transnational reach of its memory and cultural heritage. Through the literary works of Anna Banti, Curzio Malaparte, Ennio Flaiano and Maaza Mengiste, and films by Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani we will analyze how the memory of fascism and modernism has been shaped according to the needs of the political present and successively contested, reframed, and reused. Still today, fascist heritage haunts the cityscapes of Italy and the countries it occupied in East Africa and the Mediterranean through monuments, modernist architecture, and the isolation of Roman ruins. The course finally examines how visual artists, activists and writers take cues from this difficult heritage, in order to challenge collective memories and the culture of empire. This is an OSUN Collaborative Course taught in cooperation with courses on global modernism offered at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Bard College (USA), Bard College Berlin (Germany), BRAC University (Bangladesh), and the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Common sessions, lectures, readings, and/or assignments will offer opportunities for connections across the network, but the core teaching of the course will be fully in person. It is also an elective course in the OSUN MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts.

 

Course:

LIT 3432  Literature in the Digital Age

Professor:

Patricia Lopez-Gay  

CRN:

15734

Schedule/Location:

   Tues    9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

The proliferation of digital information and communications technologies over the past half-century has transformed and continues to transform how literary works are composed, produced, circulated, read, and interpreted. What new forms and practices of reading and writing have emerged in this late age of typography? What is the nature, extent, and significance of these changes? This course re-assesses questions and themes long central to the study of literature including: archiving, authorship, canon formation, circulation, materiality, narrative, poetics, and readership, among others. The course aims to understand our present moment in historical context by pairing contemporary works with texts from and about other shifts in media from the ancient world to the modern era. Readings include Augustine, Borges, Eisenstein, Flusser, Hayles, Jenkins, and Plato, as well as works of HTML/hypertext fiction, Twitter literature, online poetry, fan fiction, and so on. Coursework will include online and off-line activities in addition to traditional papers. Recommended for current and potential Experimental Humanities concentrators. This will be an OSUN course, with half of the spots reserved for Annandale students who have completed two or more years of college. Please contact the professor prior to registration.

 

Course:

LIT 353  Shakespeare's Tragedies

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

CRN:

15730

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Theater and Performance

In this course we’ll read all ten of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “Titus Andronicus”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Julius Caesar”, “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Timon of Athens”, “King Lear”, and “Coriolanus.” Our aim will be to think of these texts as platforms for sustained thought, as provocations to feeling, and as distorted mirrors of contemporary society. In them, we’ll find intricate examinations of agency, coercion, belonging, and hatred, and we’ll witness what happens when oppressive systems and volatile emotions collide. These tragedies remain flexible, durable mechanisms for exploding assumptions in topics as diverse as politics, gender, race, and economics. We’ll discover where they came from, how they were revised and rewritten, and how they have been reshaped over time by artists like Toni Morrison and Akira Kurosawa and in formats as diverse as fiction, film, graphic novels, children’s literature, and video games. Over the course of the semester, students will design a research project on a topic of their choosing and will be encouraged to think about these plays as literature, in performance, via adaptation, and as historical artifacts. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

 

Literature Senior Colloquium:

 

Course:

LIT 405  Literature Senior Colloquium I

Professor:

Alex Benson

CRN:

15735

Schedule/Location:

 Fri      11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 1

 

Class cap: 15

(1 credit) (To be taken concurrently with LIT 401) 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.

 

Course:

LIT 406  Literature Senior Colloquium II

Professor:

Alex Benson

CRN:

15736

Schedule/Location:

Mon       5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 1

 

Class cap: 30

(1 credit) (To be taken concurrently with LIT 402) 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.

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

LIT/MES 303  Petroculture

Professor:

Elizabeth Holt  

CRN:

15725

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Literature, Science, Technology, Society

 

Course:

SPAN 301  Introduction to Spanish Literature in conversation with the Visual Arts

Professor:

Patricia Lopez-Gay  

CRN:

15539

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 15

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities; Latin American/Iberian Studies; Literature