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 204C  Comparative Literature III: The Religion of Art, The Aesthetics of Life
Professor:	Matthew Mutter
CRN:	15703		Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 203
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course will explore the key aesthetic, philosophical, and political issues that emerge in European and pan-American literature from the early nineteenth through the twentieth century. Beginning with Romanticism and ending with selected modernisms of the Americas, we will pursue several conceptual through-lines: the spiritual vocations of literature in conditions of secularization; visions of the autonomy of art; the shifting boundaries between art and life and aesthetics and politics; and literature’s relation to the discourses of science. Authors may include J.W. von Goethe, S.T. Coleridge, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, César Vallejo, and Kamau Brathwaite.

 

Course:	LIT 251  English Literature II: Enlightenment & its Specters
Professor:	Cole Heinowitz
CRN:	15704		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Aspinwall 302
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, England underwent a series of systemic transformations whose repercussions would extend across the globe and whose reverberations still underpin the concept of a modern world. In political-historical terms, our study begins with the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and ends with the Inclosure Acts of 1773-1801, tracing an arc from the decline of feudalism, through decades of civil and religious wars, the restoration of monarchy, and the Act of Union with Scotland, to the rise of industrial capitalism. In literary and cultural terms, these changes are confronted and contested in the works of poets and novelists from John Donne and John Milton to Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood, as well as in foundational scientific and moral writings by thinkers from Francis Bacon to John Locke. Our inquiry into the writers, artists, and intellectuals who defined this epoch will be guided by the still-unanswered questions their works first provoked, among them: Is there a rational basis for universal human rights? Where is the dividing line between revolution and reform, or between critique and complicity? And, in the words of Audre Lorde, can you take down the master’s house using the master’s tools? 

 

Course:	LIT 259  American Literature III: What Does it Mean to Be Modern?
Professor:	Peter L'Official
CRN:	15705		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 102
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4						Class cap: 22
Crosslists: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

What did modernization, modernity, and modernism mean to American literature? This course explores American literary production from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the 20th century. In focusing upon this era’s major authors and works, we will explore 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, economic 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. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic differences are discussed at length in this course. This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.

 Pre-Moderation Required Course: Narrative / Poetics Representation

 

Course:	LIT 201 A Narrative/Poetics/Representation
Professor:	Matthew Mutter
CRN:	15700		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 106
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 15

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:	Daniel Williams
CRN:	15701		Schedule/Location:		Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Albee 106
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 15

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 C Narrative/Poetics/Representation
Professor:	Alex Benson
CRN:	15702		Schedule/Location:		Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 303
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4						Class cap: 15

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.